G-Man

42

“There he is,” said the St. Paul detective, Sergeant Brown. “He’s walking a little gimpy, but they say he’s been loopy since he got shot in the head.”

Charles and the three St. Paul officers, including the chief and the ex-chief, watched from their unmarked Ford as the man dipped across the broad, busy expanse of University Avenue at Marion Street, a perfectly unremarkable crossroads in a perfectly unremarkable section of a perfectly unremarkable city.

It was indeed Homer Van Meter, as Charles had stared at the photos for hours, committing the man’s surprisingly pleasant features to memory: the thick hair, parted on the left, combed right; the lanky frame; the prominent nose and strong chin; the dark eyes. He had a gangling roll to his stride, looked confident, solid, like a taxpayer with no worries in his head, if just a bit shabby. Hard to believe — but, then, it always was, that was the mystery of these fellows — that, inside, he was a cool-handed killer.

This one was tricky. It was Sam’s suggestion, after Uncle Phil had given Charles a solid where-when on Van Meter, that the Division take a low-profile approach on this one, unlike, say, the Dillinger arrest, where they’d flooded the street with agents.

“If the Division came crashing into town, there’d be squawks, tiffs, turf wars, lots of bitter squealing, lots of feathers sent flying,” Sam had said. “Not good. Leaks would spring, and Homer’d take off for Kansas City. Moreover, rancor and contempt between the Division and the St. Paul cops could get the Division a size-18 reputation in law enforcement circles, something the Director is keen to avoid.

“So, Charles, I want you to handle this as quietly as possible. I’d make it abundantly clear to our St. Paul friends that the Division has no interest in Homer on the subject of Minnesota corruption. We could care less. Our task is to take down the big interstate bank gangs, member by member. That’s all we want. What we do with Homer once we get him singing is something yet to be determined.”

“I got an idea they’d prefer him dead to singing. Those detectives don’t want nobody messing with their business. They may see this as a way to erase someone who knows a little too much about them. One squirt of the Thompson and a whole lot of trouble goes away.”

“That’s the issue you’ll have to deal with, Charles. You know what our goal is: Homer in custody, a long, long talk with him until he sees his best interests are served — maybe avoiding the fryer for that cop he killed at South Bend — if he gives us Baby Face or Pretty Boy.”

“Well, gents, let’s get this done and go have a drink,” said Chief Cullen, who was with Brown in the front seat. That Cullen was the chief and Brown the ex-chief showed how much juice the arrest warranted. They weren’t leaving this one to the rookies.

“You sure you need that subgun, Brown?” asked Charles, all amiable-like. The bone of contention was the Thompson gun with full-up fifty-round drum Brown carried. Charles had argued against it, since the arrest would be on public boulevards amid civilians and a wrong-way burst with a Thompson could have disastrous repercussions. But then, as now, the St. Paul officers weren’t to be denied.

“Mr. Justice Department, Homer’s fast to pistol and fast to fire. We need all the help we can get,” said Chief Cullen, as he drew a Winchester ’94 from between the seats, ran the lever to check and make sure a .30–30 was set to chamber, then slammed the lever home. At the same time, Brown hoisted his twelve-pound weapon from the floor, slid back and notched the bolt atop the gun, keeping his finger far from trigger, as a touch could let fly a maelstrom, and secured it tight to body for movement. Meanwhile, the fourth detective threw the pump on his Winchester riot gun.

The four emerged just as Homer made it across, moving away from them, and though bent low to support their guns and hold them close to the shoulder, they increased their pace to overtake him. It was like running to ground a fox who didn’t know he was being hunted. They closed swiftly as Homer lollygagged along, enjoying the relatively cool air, the sense of freedom, whatever a normal man enjoys not knowing that his executioners approach.

As for Charles, it was clear he was hopeless to prevent what the St. Paul boys were determined to make happen, and he felt a twinge for having been a part of the setup, which was looking more and more like a Capone-style rubout than an arrest. He separated ever so slightly from the three and moved his hand closer to the .45 under his left arm, though with so much firepower on scene, he knew it was doubtful he’d need to shoot.

When the range had closed to within twenty-five feet, it was Chief Cullen who, lifting rifle to shoulder, shouted, “HOMER!” Homer turned, and Charles saw the flash of panic overtake his face, but just as fast the recognition of the guns bearing down on him. He went the hard way, thrusting his hand inside the jacket he wore for his own iron and, instantly, scuttling sideways for cover in an alley.

The Thompson settled the issue. Brown had time enough to come to shoulder, put weight against the gun to fight recoil, aim cleverly, and unleash. The hammer of the burst shattered the benign Midwestern air, and banished all other noise, as the fire stream roared into Homer and ripped him up bad. Brown was a good gunner, with lots of work on the Thompson, so it wasn’t a broad sweep of bullets, kicking up a commotion over a large area, with Homer in the middle; the bullets instead went to and stayed on him, all the way through the fall, only a few puffing the dust. He went down, his jacket smoking and torn from the fusillade that had ruptured him. Maybe the chief fired too, and maybe the detective with the riot gun, for shots of another declension sounded, but the noise was lost as Sergeant Brown fired multiple coups de grâce into the fallen man, causing his body to twitch and shudder. Then, silence.

The usual: the cops approached stealthily, as if a man could survive such a blast, while the chief raised his arm and began to shout, “Police action! Stand clear, folks, stand clear. Police action!” but the citizens became a circus around the torn figure at the center of it all.

Brown and the shotgunner knelt by the body, and Charles approached to note that among the wounds inflicted on the man, a string of slugs had evidently struck his right hand, which was so mutilated, it hardly seemed human anymore, the thumb removed as if by surgery, the fingers twisted in ways they were not meant to twist, the whole glistening with fresh blood.

“That’s the way we handle it in St. Paul, G-Man,” said Brown, evidently proud of his role in the drama. “He ain’t going nowhere, that’s for sure.”

“Yeah,” said Charles, holstering his automatic, “but you’ll be up all night reloading that drum.”

Homer did go somewhere, eventually — that is, to the morgue, after the morgue truck arrived, following on several patrol cars, whose inhabitants set up a perimeter that kept the public from scuffing up the crime scene. It was the usual police theater: photos, reporters with notebooks, from somewhere a city attorney, a few other sub-chiefs, white-coated morgue guys with the gurney — familiar in form, if not content, from the Dillinger business, though not quite as electrically charged as that, for Homer hadn’t been as electrically charged as Johnny.

43

Not much for today. Just go over it, go over it, go over it. Maybe something would happen. Or maybe a break: one of the emails or interviews he’d sent out would bear surprising fruit. It hadn’t happened yet, but maybe today would be the day.

Swagger had finished his shower and was dressed. The next step was coffee and a muffin in the hotel coffee shop while he diddled with his iPhone to check emails, and then someone knocked at his door. Too early for housekeeping; they knew he usually didn’t leave for his coffee until 8:30.

It was Nick. Surprising, because Nick always called or emailed when he had something and their meets took place in Nick’s big workroom.

“What’s up?” Swagger asked.

“Something came to me. It was shortest here, no need to go all the way back.”

“Okay.”

Nick went to the desk in the suite, which was clear, and set down a sack from CVS pharmacy. He removed a freshly packed small file, a couple of No. 2 Eagle pencils, an unopened bag of plastic gloves, a ream of 8½ × 11 paper, and a $5.95 magnifying glass.

“Is that a junior-detective kit?” asked Bob.

“Nope, you have to be at least a GS-22 to get one of these.”

“I love to watch a professional at work,” said Swagger.

Nick picked up his briefcase.

“I was returning the handgun policy memo downtown,” Nick said. “But something about it was turning in my mind. Don’t know why, something seemed provocative about it.”

“Maybe that it’s an original, not a photocopy,” said Bob.

“No, some feature beyond that. Some feature that takes off from that.”

Bob tried to list features.

“It’s thin, it’s dry, it’s fragile, it’s old, Donovan was such a powerful typist that her periods blew clean through and opened little holes — is that what you mean?”

“Okay,” said Nick, “let’s see if I’m as brilliant as I think I am. Or even more brilliant.”

He put on his reading glasses, snatched up the hotel-issue coffee mug and turned it over, setting it on its rim, presenting its clean, slightly concave bottom to the world. He took up one of the pencils, opened his pocketknife, and whittled a point of exposed lead into the flat end. He opened up the file package… Oof, why did they pack these things in superstrength, human-finger-indestructible Kevlar?

“You need the file to open the package,” he said, “but the fucking file is in the package.”

He got the file free and delicately applied it to the exposed lead of the pencil. A small dust of lead particles began to accumulate in the cup’s concave bottom.

“I hope you’re not in a rush,” he said. “This may take some time.”

“I’m Available Jones today,” Bob said.

In five minutes or so, he’d accumulated a little heap of powdered lead in the cup surface.

“Okay, here’s where it gets dicey,” he said.

He ripped open the ream of paper, took out a sheet, and laid it on the desk.

Next, he opened the bag of gloves and, like a surgeon, pulled one onto each hand.

“Don’t tell me to bend over,” said Bob.

“Ha!” Nick laughed. He opened the briefcase, reached in, and removed one of the ancient handgun memo’s pages, holding it by the corners only and as gently as possible.

Holding it up to the light, he located the blot of ink where, eighty-three years ago, some administrator had applied waterproof ink to the capitalized letters signifying authorship, the imprimatur of office standard practices. He held it up to the light.

“Can’t see a thing,” he said. “I’d hoped the initials of the author would stand out.”

“They knew what they were doing,” said Bob.

“But the one thing they didn’t count on was the speed, power, and accuracy of Elaine P. Donovan, the best typist in Western Civilization. She typed so hard, and the paper was so thin, her keystrokes carried through to the other side of the paper. This was especially true of letter arrangements her fingers were familiar with.”

He laid the memo facedown, next to the white sheet. The paper was so thin and crackly, the offending blot showed through it.

“Okay, Dr. Watson, watch this.”

Taking the cup to the memo, tilting it a bit, he used his pocketknife blade to skim off some lead particulate onto the obverse side of the blot. Then, with the blade, he tidied the pile so that it was evenly applied over the blot.

“Here we go,” he said.

Taking the memo up again, he neatly flipped it and laid it across the white, pristine sheet of paper. Then with his knife blade’s dull edge he gently rubbed back and forth, applying enough pressure for his task, but not so much as to shred or damage the paper.

“See, they blotted out the top side. They didn’t realize her powerful typing inscribed the letters through the paper. So now I’ve coated it with a light dusting of lead and pressed it against a sheet of paper. It’s like Gutenberg’s Bible; the raised surface of the letters should leave an impression.”

And they did:

“Welcome back to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Special Agent Swagger,” said Nick.

44

Helen and J.P. were stunned by the weight of Les’s grief. The news floored him, and he — uncharacteristically, without a tie, shoeless, sockless — just sat, face slack, eyes empty, locked in depression. He stared at nothing, and out of respect for his agony, they treated him like an infant, tiptoeing around him, speaking in whispers and mutters.

“Honey, you haven’t eaten all day. Do you want me to fix you a sandwich and a Coca-Cola?”

He didn’t respond. He just sat on the sofa with the newspaper in front of him.

GANGSTER VAN METER SLAIN, it said in a bold, eight-column headline, and underneath, in smaller type, COPS MACHINE-GUN DILLINGER PAL ON STREET.

There was a gaudy picture of Homer on the slab in the morgue, his head held alert by some sort of armature so that the wide-open eyes, the gauntness of his frame, the abrasions where he’d gone to earth, stood out starkly. He’d had better days. It was a grisly specimen of how unremarkable newspapers and citizens held death in the midst of both a crime and a heat wave, and a dead mobster on a slab, all his holes displayed against the alabaster of his skin in black-and-white photography, sold a lot of papers, as the national indoor sport had become keeping track while the law shot down the surviving Dillinger boys.

“It don’t look like the Division had a hand in this one,” said J.P. later in the afternoon to his silent best friend. “It sounds like the St. Paul boys decided they didn’t want him hanging around town, they didn’t want him bringing in the Division and having them looking too closely at things, so they just decided to deal with the situation themselves. I mean, they had to know he was there; they could have done this kind of thing anytime, they just happened to decide to do it yesterday.”

Les didn’t answer. He didn’t make eye contact. He sat still in his coma, oblivious. Finally, lethargically, he called into the bedroom, “Honey, can you bring me a Coca-Cola, please?” Then he turned to J.P.

“You got it exactly. Why now? Why all of a sudden? Where does it come from, this sudden need to kill Homer? Something’s not right here.”

“Les, the guy’s the object of a manhunt. He ain’t as smart as you. He goes back to St. Paul where everybody knows him, he’s easy to find.”

“He thinks he’s safe there. And he is safe, until something changes. What changed? That’s what I’m asking.”

“I don’t know,” said J.P.

“The deal is, they leave us alone if we don’t do jobs in St. Paul. That’s why St. Paul is safe. And far as I know, he was too daffy to work after he took that pill to the head. Remember, the night before they got Johnny he was supposed to go to that meet with us in Glenview and the guy never showed. That shows he was cuckoo in the clock tower. Not clear, not whole, not thinking.”

J.P. knew it wasn’t time to remind Les that he, Les, had been enraged with Homer for letting him down and that previously he’d even told a number of people he meant to kill Homer for his idiocy in not putting together the South Bend job well, for his endless spew of bad jokes, and for hanging around with that Mickey Conforti, who had entertained legions of admirers in her time, a liaison that Les felt profaned his own, richer love for Helen.

“Poor guy,” said Les, taking a Coca-Cola on ice from Helen, then suddenly going all dramatic on them. It just poured out of him.

“I did four jobs with Homer. He was a professional. He was a guy who knew what he was doing. But what I remember best is that long run down the street to the car in South Bend. Cops everywhere, all of them shooting at Les, plus Les’s got twenty-five pounds of bulletproof jacket on, twelve pounds of machino, and four or five twenty-round mags of .45s, plus one used-up drum, so Les’s not exactly Red Grange. He’s a slow boat to China, and all the cops have to do is take one second to aim and Les’s head is splattered all over Indiana. Meanwhile, Les’s pals are ducking into the car and they’re happy as hell to have the cops shooting at Les and not them. But who saves Les? It’s Homer. Homer doesn’t run for the car. Homer stands there, a man’s man, a soldier’s soldier, a hero’s hero, straight out in the open, and very carefully lays down .351s everywhere he sees a cop settling in for the finisher on Les. That’s Homer: he doesn’t give a damn about himself, he just gives everything up for a buddy, for a guy he don’t even like, for a guy that’s teased him about his girlfriend, for a guy that never laughs at his jokes and wants to wring his neck more often than not. Homer just stands there and saves all of Les’s bacon, and when Les, with more crap on him than a doughboy going over the top, makes it back to the car, he’s unhit and good for more action, only then — then and only then — does Homer himself head to the car to get the hell out of town.

“Stop and think about it. Would you do that for me, J.P.? Maybe. I sure hope so. But neither of us will know until the time comes. And maybe I’d do it for you, and I hope I would, but there’s no telling. What I do know is, Homer did it for me: he risked everything he had for me. He was willing to die or spend the rest of his life in the Indiana state pen, all for me. That’s the bravest thing, I think: not to be brave for yourself but for a buddy when it gets you nothing and costs you everything.”

“Homer would be happy that you spoke so well of him,” said J.P.

“It’s the only epitaph someone in our business gets.”

They went quiet for a bit, as Les worked on the Coca-Cola. But Les wasn’t quite done.

“Here’s the other thing. Homer leaps into the car, he’s the getaway driver, and he catches something in the head and it knocks him out cold. Johnny pulls him over and climbs behind the wheel, and he’s the one who saves everybody’s bacon. In less than two months, both are gone. These guys weren’t fools. They didn’t make mistakes. Nothing random was going to get them. They weren’t going to be shot by the kid in the gas station or even get picked up on a drunk-driving charge. So if they go down, they go down because somebody squealed them out. And who would know where they were — in two different cities, no less. Who? Helen, can you answer that? J.P.? Come on, you’re smart, you’ve been around. Who?”

“It doesn’t make any sense, Les. Why would the Italians turn on us? As long as we’re getting the headlines, nobody notices them taking over the wires, the unions, the pictures, the banks even. They need us. That’s why they let us stay at their safe houses, armor up from their weapons rooms, sleep with — excuse me, Helen — a Mob trixie. And I don’t mean Les, Helen, he’s as true as a cowboy.”

“I know that, J.P. That’s why I love him so much.” She reached out and put her hand on her husband’s wrist. He patted it but was not done with his riff.

“I don’t know why they’re doing this. I don’t know who’s doing it. But one guy is making this happen. I will find him. I will pay him back.”

Les’s depression didn’t clear, even if he had returned to talkativeness. But inside, where the little wheels were, those wheels were whirring and buzzing and rattling like crazy, so that even if he was joking with Helen, or fucking her, even if he was out on the prairie working on his shooting skills — say, he was damned good, getting better! — he had that issue somewhere in his brain. He knew he couldn’t move until he figured it out.

One day, he took a fiver to the bank, asked for quarters, walked through San Antonio until he found a phone booth in an out-of-the-way spot, and dipped in.

“Number, please.”

“I’d like to put through a call to Reno, Nevada. Enterprise 5487.”

“Yes sir. That’ll be two dollars and twenty-five cents for the first three minutes.”

“Got it.”

He fed in nine quarters and waited.

“Yeah?”

“Long Distance. I have a call for this number from a… What is your name, sir?”

“Les Smith.”

“Les—”

“It ain’t collect?”

“No sir.”

“Fine, I’ll take it… Les?”

“Skabootch? Is that you?”

“No, Les, it’s Doc Bone. How are you, kid?”

“I’m fine, Doc. This line clean?”

“Yeah, the heat’s off for now. It comes, it goes — who knows why? Listen, you want Skabootch?”

“It doesn’t matter, Doc. I need a favor, nothing big, just some help.”

“Sure, kid. Ask, it’s yours.”

“You heard about Homer going down?”

“Yeah, a shame. Good man. I heard they chopped him bad.”

“Bastards. Anyhow, here’s what I need to know. You must have friends who have friends who have connections with St. Paul Homicide.”

“If I don’t, Skabootch does. He don’t, Soap would.”

“Well, whoever.”

“What’s up, kid?”

“I have to know how it happened. It’s the Division that’s got the itch for us, and Homer thought he was home free in St. Paul. No Division there. But he gets burned by coppers with choppers. So I have to know if there was anything going on? Any new players, any decisions made on high, just what the hell happened that guys he’s palled around with suddenly park a drum on him. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Maybe it was just bad luck, kid.”

“Nobody’s luck is that bad. Ask around for me, will you, Doc?”

“Sure, kid. You call me back tomorrow, this time, this number, maybe I’ll have something for you by then.”

“You’re the best, Doc. I knew I could count on you.”

So that buoyed Les up for a night, and he took Helen dancing in one of her new dresses, and then to a picture, and then took her back to the room and fucked her good. He awoke in good spirits too, and at the appointed hour, in a different booth, he put the call through to Doc Bone. But this time he got Skabootch.

“Yeah, Les, I know what you’re after. Kid, some advice. You got friends out here, you’re loved for your talent and guts, maybe you ought to give up on Chicago for a while. It ain’t healthy. We could put you to work.”

“In a few months when I get this stuff straightened out, maybe then. I could see it, Helen and me, J.P. too, we’d like it out there permanent.”

“You always got a place here.”

“Anyway—”

“Well, here’s what I found out. It was three St. Paul detectives, plus some other guy. It must have been important, because one of the shooters was the chief himself, Cullen, and another was Brown, who’d been the chief, but is in all kinds of soup for taking bribes, and maybe even going on out-of-state jobs with certain individuals.”

“The other guy? The fourth guy?”

“There’s your million-dollar mystery. It was some tall guy, always wore a fedora, always looked buttoned-up and official. Hard eyes — man-killer eyes — the three treated him like a guy who had to be respected. Wasn’t introduced to other cops by Cullen, so nobody knows. Disappeared right after the shooting, no mention of him to press or even to other coppers. The three on the job kept it to themselves, and nobody’s got the balls to ask ’em. Nobody knows.”

But Les knew in a second. It was the Western gunfighter who’d stood tall and straight on the hill off Wolf Road, while Les’s slugs tore up the earth around him, and fired a handgun from a hundred yards that missed Les’s head by an inch.

“Okay, Skabootch, thanks. Yeah, now I see. Now I know what I got to do.”

45

“So the document is back in the archives?” Bob asked.

“Yes, but retrievable when we need it,” said Nick.

Rawley was the smart one on tech, and he had the StingRay cell site simulator, which impersonated a cell tower. It gets the call attempt, analyzes it, and passes it along to a real cell tower. It’s a highly advanced Gen 7 femtocell, small and portable, able to decrypt both sides of a cell call using NSA intercept software. It was about the size of a shoe box, had thirteen numbered LED displays, with up-and-down switches next to each, labeled “Target Phone,” and another thirteen digits underneath, labeled “Connected Phone.” The thirteenth made it feasible for deployment against foreign units. “On/Off” switch, self-contained speaker with volume control. Jack for headphone. He could tune into radio station WBOB anytime he was within two miles.

He sat in the back of the rented Chevy SUV parked in a McLean strip mall and had his program locked in, the device on his lap. It wasn’t your garden-variety, Amazon-bought toy, and where the two-hundred-dollar Amazon job would have said SAMSUNG, this $119,000-per-unit said PROP OF US GOVT and AUTHORIZED USERS ONLY. It was a state-of-the-art, military-grade penetration device, top secret, and carried by serial number in the inventory of the 465th Security Battalion of the 3rd Brigade, Military Police Detachment, Pine Bluff Arsenal, which was responsible for making sure none of the army’s stores of white-phosphorus munitions ended up in terrorist hands. Pine Bluff Arsenal was about sixty-five miles southwest of Little Rock, and it was on Rawley’s lap, courtesy of the battalion’s commanding officer, who had been discovered in a compromising situation on one of Rawley and Braxton’s recent adventures, something about a dancer in one of Mr. Kaye’s strip joints in West Little Rock while the wife was out of town.

The genius of the system was that the phone didn’t even have to be on for them to listen in. It was as if Bob was broadcasting, from wherever he went. But there were limits, if only to their own patience. They listened in whenever Bob was with anyone. Of course it made no sense to listen to Bob when he was by himself, as he didn’t talk to himself, or God, or an imaginary girlfriend, or a large white rabbit. So they stayed far away, over the horizon in those situations, and listened only when he made phone calls and whatnot. But the sessions with Nick were pure gold because that’s when he unloaded all his fears, his doubts, his frustrations.

“Okay… the way… you want to play… I’d get moving… form recognition… how bur… can be.”

“I have to figure out the best route through all this, how to use the new confirmation. What do I owe Charles? What do I owe the Bureau? What do I owe history?”

“When you see it… you’ll know it.”

Rawley and Braxton found this whole thing very interesting. It was the primitive power of narrative. Everybody loves a story and wants to know how it comes out. The saga of the strange Arkansas gunman in Chicago in the middle of the gangster war provoked them.

But there was so much to learn. Why had Charles been eliminated from FBI records? Why had he returned home in seeming shame from Chicago? Why had his life then gone into a downward spiral until he was a drunk, bitter, isolated, indifferent to his wife and son? And why had he died the way he did? All that mystery was unpenetrated. And was liable to remain unpenetrated.

“It’s impossible,” said Bob, “since no one is left alive from those days except that old lady, and she didn’t know much except that he had the smell of whiskey on him and a bandage on his ear. The kind of stuff he did, there were no records, no documents, no photos, no witness accounts, nothing. No place to go at all.”

Braxton was by this time an expert on dialogue between Nick and Bob, its nuances, its leitmotifs, its subtexts, its Mametian elisions, and he said to Rawley, “He wasn’t much on his game today. They’ve had better conversations. What was the point of going through it all over again? What even was the point of the meeting?”

They both knew Bob had called the meeting and had rushed to get there. But, for what? For this? Made no sense.

“Maybe he’s losing it. He got a big breakthrough this morning and it’s got him all mixed up. He’s supposed to be so smart. I have to laugh. He’s a dumber hillbilly than we are, Rawley. He still don’t get who we are. He only has a suspicion he’s been targeted, and he ain’t making no progress at all. Mr. Kaye’s going to be disappointed. He backed the wrong horse, and the Russians are going to send him for a deep dive in an Arkansas lake.”

Rawley smiled once for seven-tenths a second. That was his way of saying he thought that was pretty funny. It also might have communicated the message that he knew something Swagger didn’t.

“So the document is back in the archives?” Bob said, and slid a handwritten note to Nick.

Nick read the note, and then said, “Yes, but retrievable when we need it.”

The note said “Can you check with technical people on iPhone-penetration technologies. Could mine be compromised? It’s never been out of my possession and yet I get the being-followed vibe every time I’m with somebody — like now, for example. Then, when I’m alone, I get nothing. So somehow they KNOW when there’ll be chatter and when there won’t. And when there won’t, they minimize the chance of discovery by disappearing.”

“Okay, if that’s the way you want to play it. I’d get moving on the recognition issue, though. You know how bureaucracies can be,” said Nick, and wrote a response.

“I’ll call Jeff Neill. I’m not up on this stuff, but I know it’s a big item in security circles.”

Bob continued with the chatter. “I have to figure out the best route through all this, how to use the new confirmation. What do I owe Charles? What do I owe the Bureau? What do I owe history?”

When Bob was done, Nick said, “But someone believes you’re going to solve the mystery and find a treasure in guns or bills worth millions. Else why would they be following you?” During that time, Bob wrote, “Thanks. It has to be the phone. Nothing else capable of receiving and sending information is on me — no cards with chips, no GPS, my watch is fifteen years old, nothing.”

46

It happened fast. The day before, Charles got the message from Uncle Phil to call him and four minutes later the mystery gangster told him that something had just broken. Someone at a pool hall near East Liverpool swore that Pretty Boy Floyd and his pal Adam Richetti had just shown up, looking like hobos, and asked the owner, Joy, for some food and a place to rest. Joy obliged but gave the nod, as the word was out that certain people were very interested in Pretty Boy. So the news reached Charles, Charles was telling Sam, and at that moment the Director called Sam, said that in Cincinnati Purvis had gotten a call from the sheriff of Columbiana County, Ohio, that they were closing in on Pretty Boy Floyd somewhere outside of the selfsame East Liverpool. It was all coming together on Pretty Boy.

The news was that Pretty Boy, Richetti, and two frails, the Baird sisters, were traveling from somewhere out East back to the Midwest. They were probably going to lay over in East Liverpool, since it was an area Pretty Boy had worked when he was just the hillbilly Charlie Floyd from the Cookson Hills, in Oklahoma. It was years before he became, as he had on Dillinger’s death, Public Enemy No. 1, and a priority for a Division that wanted him to pay the bill for the Kansas City Massacre, where two of its agents were gunned down. That had been a great Career Move for Charlie, putting him on the map in a way his somewhat obtuse mind would not have permitted, the irony being that while it made him famous, he actually hadn’t been there. He’d killed over ten men, was as bold as they came, if that dumb too, a superb shot and cunning gunfighter, and liked the fame, even if he had to explain to everybody that he would never turn the Thompson loose on anybody, even cops and Division men sitting in a car.

Anyhow, just outside of East Liverpool, a wide-open town on the Ohio side of the big river forty miles west of Pittsburgh, Charlie had managed to crack up in a ditch. Stupid is as stupid does. None of the other big bank guys ever made such a dumb-ass move and ended up like these two, wandering the countryside, waiting for the two girls (who’d walked into town) to pick up some transportation and come fetch them. Another irony was that as satisfying as it was for Charlie to be number one on the Director’s list, it also meant he was movie-star famous and couldn’t flash his mug just anywhere, as in the old days.

Once it became known that Public Enemy No. 1 was in play, things pretty much turned into a carnival, East Ohio river town — style. The sheriff and a couple deputies ran into Charlie and Adam, had a nice little gunfight with them, the result being that Adam was captured, and Charlie dropped his Tommy gun, but, slippery as ever, somehow ran into the Appalachian woods and got away. He wandered a bit, caught a ride, almost got nailed at a roadblock, skipped out again, and spent the night shivering in the forest.

By today, the Division had flooded the place with agents from Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Chicago, under the nominal control of Purvis, up by plane from Cincy, who was a little unsure how to handle the situation. He ended up with five cars full of agents more or less roaming the countryside, while two hundred local cops and State policemen set up roadblocks or did their own roaming. Cops were everywhere, and it was just a matter of time before the bedraggled Charlie ran into them or they ran into him.

Swagger ended up with twelve pounds of drummed-up Thompson gun on his lap in the backseat of a Dodge as it prowled and pawed up and down the dirt roads of Columbiana County, just north of East Liverpool, through a melee of autumn coloration, the season wearing its full glory. Ahead of him, wearing overcoats, scarves, fedoras, sat Purvis and Ed Hollis. Hollis was behind the wheel, while Sam McKee, out of the Cleveland Office, sat next to Charles. He had a Winchester pump riot gun, a dangerous piece of equipment, but unlike so many of the kids, he was a disciplined former police officer and wouldn’t accidentally shoot his or anybody else’s foot off. Behind them, another sedan carried four somewhat disgruntled and perhaps untrustworthy East Liverpool cops, including that department’s chief.

“Should we have gotten dogs, Charles?” Mel asked.

“You need something for them to read scent,” said Charles. “They can’t work without a scent. And since we ain’t got nothing off of Floyd but reports, they’ll just bark and shit and cause trouble.”

“Good, good, I knew I made the right decision.”

Everybody laughed. Mel, as always, was the charmer.

“I love it when I make the right decision,” he added, to more laughter.

Outside, where all eyes were trained intensely, East Ohio farmland rolled by, but in this part of the state, just off the big river, almost in Pennsylvania and the real East, it wasn’t the endlessly flat farmland of legend but instead hillier, full of clumps of gaudy orange-red trees, shadowy glades, small valleys, bare knobs, crosscut by streams, dotted with ponds, land that glaciers had torn all to hell a couple hundred thousand years ago, pushing boulders up here, squishing them down there, almost as if the ice sheets were designing a landscape in which desperadoes could hide efficiently. Wasn’t much to grow on land so scrambled, so it was mostly small dairy or sheep or cattle spreads owned by hard workers who worshipped as hard as they worked and were as hospitable to outsiders as hard as they worshipped.

“If these people weren’t so damned decent,” said Ed Hollis, “we wouldn’t have any trouble at all. In Iowa they’d call the cops the first sign of a stranger. Here, they invite ’em in, give ’em dinner, and a free night’s lodging, a new suit of clothes, and loan ’em the car and the daughter.”

Everybody laughed again.

“I take it they’re more careful with their daughters in Iowa, eh, Ed?” asked Mel.

“Damn, look at one of those gals and you end up in jail! It was easier to get into law school than to get a date with my wife. I had to submit more forms, some in triplicate!”

Everybody laughed. Hollis could be funny.

Despite the heavy weapons they carried and the prospect of killing at any moment, the four were in a good mood, maybe happy to be out of the Chicago Office pressure cooker, and Mel, freed from the awkwardness of his situation, was especially relaxed, as he probably saw this as a way to get back in the Director’s good graces. At the same time, he had no problem deferring the tactical issues to Charles.

“Where is that damned boy?” wondered Mel. “You’d think he’d have sense to know the jig was up by now, get tired of sleeping in mud and begging for sandwiches from farmers’ wives, and turn himself in, if only for the hot food.”

“He’s not what you call blessed in the brain department,” said Ed. “But, about now, he’s probably figured out it’s over.”

“That ain’t how their minds work,” said Charles, looking intently out the window as trees and small hills covered in pasture grass rolled by. “They always think they can get away with it. They just don’t believe in no odds, and they don’t learn no lessons. They’re just as stubborn as they are stupid.”

“Farm ahead,” noted McKee. “Maybe he’s on lunch break again.”

“He sure does like to eat, doesn’t he?” said Mel. “I never met a hungrier bank— Hey!”

They all saw it. The farmhouse was on the right, behind a mailbox with the name CONKLE painted on it, and the farm’s standard features included auxiliary structures — a barn, sheds, silo, and corncrib — and a car had just lurched to a rough halt on its journey out, then jerked backwards, in a rush, behind the corncrib, which, loaded to the brim with cobs, offered concealment from the road.

“Oh, boy,” said Mel, “another brilliant move by Pretty Boy. Don’t keep driving, as if it’s a normal trip. No, halt and pull back. Make sure we notice.”

Hollis stopped the car, and the four agents peeled out, as Purvis gave a hands-up halt signal to the trailing vehicle and indicated with the same crude gesture that the four East Liverpool officers should move in on the oblique rather than going straight up the gut as he and his agents were about to do. The four men in blue got out, all with lever-actions or pump guns, and began their circle around toward the back of the farmhouse.

On the crouch, the other three agents began to close in on the vehicle behind the corncrib. The next sound was pumps gliding back, then being slammed forward, primed for firing. Charles went alone on the right. He didn’t need help because he held the Thompson locked against his shoulder, but downward at a forty-five-degree angle. The thing was a beast, especially with the flair of the drum guaranteeing extreme awkwardness, but it was otherwise so brilliantly designed that all the weight seemed to pull it toward the target, and you couldn’t heft it without feeling that near-gravitational force yank it toward the act of shooting. He’d checked the bolt — back — and with his thumb felt that the safety was off and the fire selector set on full automatic.

It was a sunny afternoon, twilight just coming on, the air crisp and biting, a brisk north wind pushing down from the higher latitudes, chilling all in its path, yet aside from the rush as it poured across the land, not a sound could be heard anywhere. It was a good day for killing, as fall seems to stir the blood for the hunt.

When Ed and Sam seemed to have almost completed the circumference of the corncrib but hadn’t quite come into the open to face the car, they looked to Mel, a little behind, who nodded and then yelled, “Floyd, Justice Department! Give yourself up. We’re heavily armed and we will shoot!”

Another moment of silence, and Charles, on the right, eased forward just a bit, edging around the wire cage jammed with the corncobs, drying out to make winter feed for the Conkle cattle. The old car eased into view, and he could see two men in it. The door opened, one of them, in overcoat and hat, spilled out, a heavyset guy in his thirties, with a square face with a look of bitter determination on it. It was clearly Pretty Boy, but Charles held fire, as it was still possible his hands might fly up. And even if they didn’t, there was that fellow still in the car a little too close for comfort.

Floyd appeared to study the issue for about a tenth of a second, then dipped, spun, and took off. He raced across the front yard, through an orchard of apple trees, and Charles’s companions opened up with shotgun and automatic pistol, blowing the hell out of the low-hanging branches, so that they disintegrated into a spray of twigs, sprigs, dry russet leaves, and chunks of fruit, a sudden blizzard accompanied by the roar of the guns. Yet Floyd scampered through this inclement element without missing a step, as he in fact found a surge of power in himself, knowing that he could easily outrun the range of the shotgun or the pistol, and he ran like hell.

He took off at a diagonal into the field behind the farmhouse, his obvious goal another line of trees a hundred yards away. Head down, his strong legs attacking the turf like a running back’s, his arms clawing in rhythm against the atmosphere, his shoulders bobbing and weaving to that same rhythm, he made astonishing headway, opening up the distance in seconds.

“Charles,” yelled Purvis from the left, still invisible behind the crib, “bring him down!”

Without willing it, he drew the Thompson gun to shoulder and rotated it upward, and his two strong hands clamped its two swept-back grips hard against him, mooring the heavy thing solidly. Through his right eye, through the aperture in the rather too complex Lyman ladder-style rear sight, and at the point of the blade of the front, he tracked the running man, computing for deflection, velocity, and trajectory, rolling smoothly in pace with the runner’s speed, and when all equations suggested to him they had been solved, his finger feathered against the trigger. With a hydraulic spasm, as if operating in an environment of thick jelly, the gun fired four times in less than a third of a second, with only the last shot seeming to miss the target, as the Cutts compensator on the muzzle compensated, as usual, nothing. Four spent shells tumbled to the right.

Over the top of the gun, and through the sudden screen of gun smoke, he saw a thin gray smear of blur, which seemed to appear from nowhere, as Floyd took his shipment of lead hard, and went down hard, as if his knees had been poleaxed, and he rolled in the high grass, squirmed, wriggled, tried to rise again.

“Give him another squirt!” screamed Mel.

Charles set about to comply, but at that instant two East Liverpool officers were on the fallen man, subduing and disarming him.

“Good shooting, Sheriff,” said Mel.

“Nice work,” said Ed. “Man, you’re a terror.”

Charles thumbed the safety, set the gun at a forty-five-degree angle upward toward the Ohio sky, tucking the butt into the well of his hip with the trigger untouched by his finger.

“Let’s see what we have bagged,” said Mel.

They set out to examine the downed man.

“Hope it ain’t the postman,” said Ed.

“Maybe it’s the Widow Conkle’s boyfriend,” said McKee.

“He tried to outrun the Thompson,” said Charles. “Only Pretty Boy Floyd could be so stupid.”

It was indeed Pretty Boy. He lay in the grass, his coat twisted, his hair a mess, his face knitted in pain. He was punk tough even now, with a prizefighter’s aura of physical strength though clearly broken in bone and pierced in flesh by the bullets. But he didn’t seem to be worried about his wounds or his fate. He was okay with it. The world wouldn’t see Charlie Floyd go soft at the end. The two officers stood over him.

“He tried to get cute with these,” one of them said, holding out a .45 automatic he’d stripped off the wounded man. The other officer had one too.

“What’s your name, fella?” asked Purvis, kneeling.

“Murphy,” said the man, as if he was hungry to get in a bar fight. Maybe they could kill him, but, goddammit, they couldn’t pacify him.

“Sure looks like Charlie Floyd to me,” said Ed Hollis. “Same square-headed hillbilly mug, same pig eyes, same Negro lips.”

“Fuck you, G-Man,” said the man.

“You’re Floyd,” said Purvis.

“Yeah, I’m Floyd,” said the man, sneering. “I just made you famous!”

“How bad you hit?”

“Stretch there hit me three times in the brisket. I’m done for.”

“I’m afraid you are,” said Purvis. Then he turned, rose, and said, “Okay, I’m going to take the car and find a phone to call Washington. You ride with this guy to the hospital or the morgue, whichever, I’ll catch up.”

“Yes sir,” said Charles.

“Nice work, fellas. The Director will be proud.”

He turned, and as he jogged back to the car, they could see other police vehicles pulling up to the Conkle farm, perhaps drawn by the sound of the shots or the smell of the blood.

McKee leaned over Floyd, who was knitting in pain as he adjusted to his fate. Now the accumulation of blood seeping out from beneath him was beginning to show.

“Got anything to say, Oklahoma? Was that you at Kansas City?”

“I ain’t telling you nothing, you sonovabitch,” Floyd said.

“Okay, pal, if that’s your choice, that’s your choice.”

“Fuck you,” Floyd said. “I’m going.”

47

“Tony!” yelled Les.

Tony Accardo turned, saw his old pal, and ran to him. They had a nice embrace, as both had grown up in the Patch, that tougher-than-tough square mile of West Chicago where so few made it out, but both of them had. Both were successes. Tony was a high-level manager in the organization, yet to be named but referred to colloquially as “The Italians,” under a Mr. Nitto, known incorrectly to the press as a Mr. Nitti. Les was a true star, now Public Enemy No. 1.

“Good to see you, pal!”

“Good to see you!” said Les. They were outside the new Marshall Fields Department Store, on the main street of the little city just north of Chicago, with its own miles of beautiful lakefront. Evanston was, as well, a city of elms, and the smell of burning leaves choked the air, as every fall the good folks of the town burned the fallen leaves in the street. A clock overhead showed that it was exactly 1 p.m., as Les had planned.

“Brrr! Come on, it’s cold, let’s get inside somewhere.”

Tony—“Joe Batters,” to the trade — crossed the street, and Tony led Les down a brisk block, across Orrington Avenue, right at the library, turned past the Carlson Building, walked a few dozen feet farther, and then dipped into a restaurant called Cooley’s Cupboard.

“Whoa! Hate the chills,” said Tony. “The older I get, the thinner my skin gets!”

“Ain’t it the truth!” agreed Les. “I’m just up from the South. Texas. I forgot how cold Chicago gets.”

They found a booth in the place, which was done in hardwood after the fashion of something Medieval. It was a popular joint, now abuzz with lunchers, many from the big Carlson Building next door, Evanston’s only skyscraper and leading professional building.

“You’ll like this place. They do curly fries up real good. I can’t get enough of ’em.”

“Sounds great,” said Les.

“And no booze. Evanston’s still dry, but I know you’re a teetotaler and don’t like boozy slobs all over you.”

“God bless the WCTU!”

They both laughed, as indeed Evanston was the national headquarters of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, their building not a block away.

“So how’s Helen?”

“Great. Love her so. Best gal in the world. How’s Ginny?”

“Ah, she’s fine. You know, they get touchy, kid two out, kid three on the way. I got something on the side downtown, so I still get my fun in, though not as much. You’d never do the deed with nobody but Helen, though?”

“That’s right. I’m a one-woman guy, God help me. He made me a bank robber, but he also made me a guy who only fucked one gal in his whole life and considered himself lucky each and every time.”

“Les… God, you haven’t changed. Still stubborn, brave, one-track. Crazy, maybe, but honest crazy, no-bones-about-it crazy, crazy with guts, still going strong, even as they’re bringing you guys down, one at a time.”

“That’s me.”

It was an entrance into the subject Les had in mind, but he decided not to force it. Instead, he and Tony chatted about old times, remembered scrapes, near misses, bad cops, good cops, mentors, enemies, grudges, allegiances, who had gotten whacked and who still kicked around — this, that, and the other thing — and if you’d noted them in the back of Cooley’s, eating chicken in gravy with curly fries and drinking Cokes, you’d have taken them for insurance men, each well turned out, in sleek suits, starched shirts, bright ties, shined shoes, nice hats, looking so bourgeois it would break your balls to find out what the deal really was.

“So anyway, Les,” Tony finally got around to asking, “I love you, but you ain’t here to hear that, you got something going on. What can I do for you? I owe you, buddy, and always will.”

“Ah, that’s old stuff, forget all that,” said Les, knowing it was impossible to forget all that. In 1924, when both were sixteen, they’d boosted a haberdashery in Melrose Park, just west of the city beyond Oak Park, and when they came out, the beat cop was waiting. He grabbed, they squirmed, and Les got away clean, but Officer O’Doyle, or whatever his name was, laid eight inches of kibosh on Tony and, when he was down and out, cuffed him. Then he dragged him back to his feet, hauled him to the nearest call box, sat him on the curb, and started to call in the paddy wagon for the bad boy.

Since it would have been Tony’s tenth or so infraction, he was looking at hard time. Since they’d clunked the haberdasher so hard, he never woke up, it would have been murder in the first degree. At sixteen, Tony wouldn’t have gotten the sizzle seat, but he was looking at forty years in Joliet. No big place in River Forest, no Ginny, no two kids, number three on way, no downtown side action, no place in the Nitto organization, no prospects except getting drilled by jigaboos in the shower every day until 1974.

But before Officer O’Whatever could punch the phone, Les jumped him from the roof and laid him out with a brick and laid him out cold. Les hadn’t run a step. He’d doubled around to set his pal free. You don’t buy loyalty like that. It took a few minutes of rummaging, but they got the key off the slugged cop, popped the cuffs, and took off, laughing wildly in the night.

“I do need a favor,” said Les. “I don’t think I ever asked you for one, even when Capone’s people told me to go blow.”

“So shoot. I’ll see what I can do, you know that.”

“You mentioned the guys going down. Johnny, Homer, now Charlie. You don’t even know that I got jumped by a cowboy, who almost parted my hair permanently, just barely scrambled out of there with my head still in one piece.”

“Well,” said Tony, “I hear that Floyd got himself blown out because he ran into a tree.”

“I did some jobs with him. Yeah, the guy was no genius. Dumb as a cockroach. But still — the other guys were all smart, careful, professional, the best. Seeing them notched, feeling myself almost done the same way, it’s damned strange when nobody came close for eighteen months before. It just suddenly starts happening. See what I’m saying?”

“I’m listening.”

Les laid it out, his fear that the only outfit that could collect and coordinate intelligence from all over the Midwest and put together a solid idea about when-where on the bank robber stars was the one run by the Italians, and that they had decided as policy, for some reason, to put all these Thompson gunners out of business.

“Well, I haven’t heard anything like that,” said Tony. “Honestly, it don’t make no sense, because while the Division is so busy hunting you guys, we’re just oozing into this and that. Jesus, Les, you have no idea where we are. Not just whorehouses and clubs and the book. No, in unions, in shops, in the movies, for god’s sake, controlling the racing wires, radio. Man, we are everywhere!”

“It doesn’t make sense to me either,” confessed Les. “But I know they got long-term thinkers, and soldiers like you and me can’t figure on their level.”

Tony had to admit that was true.

“So you want me to look around, see what I can nose out?”

“Not quick enough. No, I want to plug this up now, fast, and get back to business.”

“Don’t go to war. These old Eye-ties can have a hundred guns on the street in an hour, all of ’em looking for you. They’d go hard, and full-time, on you. I’d hate to see that.”

“Wouldn’t think of it. But if there was one guy putting all this together and someone were to rub him out, who would know? Nobody would put it together. They’d think it was some old feud. You guys are famous for your feuds, and they get settled in every alley in Chicago six nights a week.”

“It’s true. Maybe it’ll change, but it’s true.”

“So here’s my plan. I’m guessing Mr. Nitto would give this to someone high up. Someone who could make phone calls and get answers. He’d have a rank or something. I know you got ranks, divisions, sort of like the army.”

“It’s all in Italian, so you wouldn’t understand. But there are four ‘underbosses’ that basically run each quarter of the city and report only to Mr. Nitto.”

“That’s what I figured. So I figure it’s one of them. They’re the only ones with the power to get the answers. He’s snitching to the Division each time he’s able to put two and two together from reports that a certain guy will be at a certain place, like Wolf Road, or the Biograph, or a street corner in St. Paul.”

“How do you find the right guy?”

“Here’s how. You go, one at a time, to each guy. You say to him, or to one of his guys, real casual-like, ‘Say, Louie’—or whatever his name is—‘Say, Louie, I got a call last night from my old pal Les — you know, Baby Face Nelson.’ ‘Yeah?’ says Louie. ‘Yeah,’ you say. ‘He’s back in town, hanging out in Morton Grove at a motel called The Star. He’s trying to put together a big job. Thought I ought to share with you.’ ‘Good man,’ says Louie.”

“Okay,” said Tony.

“So, we go to The Star Motel in Morton Grove, or whatever. If the Division jumps us, we know it’s Louie. If they doesn’t, we know it’s not.”

“Les, I hate to say it, but that’s a crazy plan. If the Division hits you, you’re probably going to be dead.”

“Nah. For two reasons. First, I’ve upped our firepower. I’ve got a Monitor, real handy in the backseat, plus it’ll cut right through the Division cars. They only have one guy who can shoot, far as I can tell. He’ll be there, but I know him, and if I put a pill through him, they’ll break and run, and that’s my plan. Plus, second, we’re waiting for them. If we can, we’ll cut and run, but, if not, we’ll go to the Monitor and leave their heaps smoking in the road.”

Tony regarded him with wide eyes and a gaping mouth. “Man, you got balls. I never heard of anyone with balls like that.”

“I just want to nail the guy who got Johnny and Homer. And even dumb-bunny Charlie. If I get that Division gunslinger in the process, so much the better. This is the only way I can figure out how to do it.”

But Tony couldn’t get over it.

“You got the biggest set in the world. You make Capone look like a little purple nancy!”

48

His iPhone rang. It rarely did. He hated it, and seemed only to get bad news out of it, and kept trying to lose it, but people kept bringing it back to him. He almost never gave out the number, and those few to whom he did knew better than to call frivolously, if at all, unless absolutely necessary, by which he meant an announcement that the world was ending.

He looked at it, saw a Texas area code in the number box, followed by integers of a certain familiarity, and then recalled he had given the number to Bill Lebman, Hyman Lebman’s very helpful dentist grandson in San Antonio.

“Swagger… Hello, Bill.”

“Mr. Swagger.”

“That’s Bob, Bill.”

“Thank you. Bob, your visit sort of haunted me, and I was sorry I couldn’t do more. And you do remember that I said Grandpa was worried about Treasury agents because of the National Firearms Act and so he started keeping very careful records?”

“I do.”

“Well, I didn’t know the half of it. The way this happened, I remembered an old bookcase of Grandpa’s and that we’d dumped all the books in it in a box, and I thought maybe… Well, I finally found the box.”

Swagger was interested.

“Please, go on.”

“At first, nothing. But one of the books, still in its dust jacket, was something called The Postman Always Rings Twice. Crime thing, about a cook and a wife who kill her husband and almost get away with it. Anyhow, it didn’t seem like his kind of thing. He didn’t read novels, especially murder novels, he was more into history and stuff. So I opened it and it wasn’t the novel at all. He’d just wrapped the dust jacket around it as a security measure. It was his journal.”

“Did you find anything?”

“I think so. It’s too much to tell, let me fax you the relevant pages.”

“Please do.”

“I need a fax number.”

Bob grabbed the hotel guidebook, found the number.

“It’ll be a few minutes,” said Bill.

“You’re the best, Bill. Really, above and beyond.”

“My pleasure,” said Bill. “Hope this helps.”

He came in late. Mackinaw jacket (it was in the 40s outside), fedora, work pants, and boots. Tall, thin, gaunt. Odd thing, he had a bandage on his right ear, or on the top half of it. Hard eyes, sunken cheeks, wary, cautious. I know the type, man hunters, I’ve seen enough of them. Not cops, but the kind of cops that specialize in hunting men.

He waited for the last customer to slip out, then moseyed over.

“Sir,” he said, “have you got a few minutes to entertain a proposition?”

“I do,” I said. “But times are hard, and I’m not buying much.”

He reached into his coat and pulled out what I recognized to be the compensator of a Colt Monitor, just like the one, maybe the one, I’d sold a couple months earlier to Jimmie Smith.

“You should recognize this,” he said.

“May I ask where you got it? Last I saw, it was attached to a rifle I sold to a young gentleman from West Texas.”

“It’s legit, at least in that no one else claims ownership. I came by it in ways I’d prefer to keep to myself, if it’s all the same to you.”

“I’m known as a fellow who can keep his mouth shut.”

“That’s what I’ve heard. I just use it to establish bona fides. It so happens, again by ways I’d prefer to keep to myself, I have access to a rather unusual cache of weapons. Some are full-automatic—”

“See, right there, that’s trouble. Before June, no problem. But there’s this new law on the books, and right now it’s against the law to even possess such a gun without a federal tax stamp. Do you have the tax stamp?”

“No sir.”

“I was you, I’d take these guns to a bridge over a big, deep river at midnight or later and one by one dump ’em in, and think no more of it. That’s the safe way.”

“I can’t do that. Good men fought bad men with these guns, and death was involved on both sides. Can’t just toss ’em. It wouldn’t be right. I know you have connections with law enforcement people here in Texas. I’m sure there’s plenty of small departments who’d like a weapons upgrade for these dangerous times but can’t afford it. It seems to me you could see these guns channeled, one at a time, to such departments. I’d like to know that they could save a law agent’s life sometime down the road.”

“It’s a tall order,” I said. “The new law is federal, and headquarters people don’t care much for the locals and for local ways of doing things. If they stick their nose under the tent, it’s hell to pay to drive them out.”

“You’d make money; it’s not charity I’m after. You’d do swell, I guarantee it. I’m not on the far side of the law, by the way, I’ve broken no laws. These came to me via an honorable means, and at present nobody’s looking for them or has even thought of them. So they’re pretty clean.”

I wanted to help him. His intentions certainly seemed good, and he wasn’t out to make the big money. But the new law was unsettling. No one had yet figured if it was going to be the start of a crusade or one of those things nobody bothered to pay attention to. Or, worse, first one, then the other. And I didn’t want to end up in Alcatraz.

“You’ll have to tell me what they are, sir. I can’t do anything more to it without that knowledge. I also have to convince myself you’re not a Treasury officer yourself, and this isn’t a way of bringing Mr. Lebman down. I know those boys are interested in me. I have friends in law enforcement and they have told me.”

“Believe me, I am not connected in any way with the federal government.”

“Were you?”

“Again, it would be my business. I don’t think you’ll find any record of me or files anywhere. I’m not on any wanted list, as I said. To them, it’s as if I don’t exist. And, at least right now, they’re not looking for these guns. They’ve got other fish to fry and probably won’t settle down and pay attention to them for some years, if at all.”

He wasn’t exactly drunk, but I could smell the rye on his breath, and his overly precise diction was that of a fellow concentrating hard on avoiding slurring.

“Well, tell me, then, what exactly are you talking about?”

“It would be two Thompson guns, drums, mags. There’s a Super .38 and a couple .45 autos. One of the .45 autos is a newer C model, and has been worked on, so that it’s ready for fast fire out of the holster. It’s a fine gun and served its owner well. Then, there’s a Remington riot gun, their Model 11, semi. Finally — and I guess this is the one that’d turn heads — there’s the Colt Monitor.”

It was news I didn’t want. I’m pretty sure who Jimmie Smith was and unsure how to feel about the fact that I’d sold him so many weapons over the years. I knew it was a big vulnerability and could bring me down, and my family as well. It was an extremely awkward piece of business that I did not want anywhere near my life.

“I suppose, then, I can guess where you got them, if I’ve read the newspapers in the last month.”

“Sir, I just want these guns passed on AND placed where they’ll do some good. I also don’t want to get nabbed with them myself. It would complicate things a bit. I’m not in this for the money. In fact, I have a crisp, new thousand-dollar bill right here I’ll happily give you. Let it be an advance on any expenses you yourself incur in trying to place the guns well. When that’s done, you figure out how you want to handle it financially and that’ll be fine by me.”

Of course then I knew exactly where the guns had come from. The thousand he offered me was part of the same stack of bills that now rested in my account across the border, with which Jimmie Smith had paid for his Monitor.

“You make it hard to say no, but I have no choice in the matter. You deserve credit for trying to do the right thing, but who knows how the federals would act if they got whiff of such a thing. Do you see?”

He nodded.

“My best advice, now that I understand that destroying them would be a sacrilege: wrap them carefully — I’ll give you the makings of a very long-lasting Cosmoline solution — and bury them. Disguise the site well so that nobody bumbles onto them. In that condition, they can last almost indefinitely. And then… wait. That’s all. Let the years pass, pay attention to the situation. Maybe a decade or so down the road, times will be different. Maybe there’ll be an amnesty on these National Firearms weapons, maybe your own disposition vis-à-vis your employers will be adjusted and whatever happened to drive you away will be forgotten and their return can be effected. In the meantime, nobody’s using them on banks, small-town cops, strikers, postal carriers, what have you.”

“I suppose that’s my only recourse.”

“Here, I’ll assemble a package for you. No charge. My pleasure to help keep the guns now and saved for sometime in the future when they and the men who fought with them can be properly acknowledged.”

“Thank you, sir.”

So I hustled downstairs, quickly grabbed the Cosmoline components, gathered them in a cardboard box, and returned. I gave him some instructions about preparation and he seemed fine with it. And though he was shabby, by the gravity of his carriage and the maturity of his remarks, I believed him to be a capable man, rye on the breath or no rye.

“Thank you again,” he said, and shook my hand.

“I wish you luck,” I said.

“I guess I’ll stick ’em in the ground near my hunting shack. Ain’t nobody going to find them out there,” he said.

49

The Thompson rested heavily on Charles’s lap, an awkward fit because the curve of the drum pitched it at an angle so that sight wings and bolt dug in his legs. Ahead of him, he saw dark streets, an El station that looked like a fortification against the invading Hun, a lot of blinking Schlitz and Hamm’s signs in white, red, and blue from the windows of the still-open bars along Grand Street. This one wasn’t The Yellow Parrot; it was The Red Bird, avian monikers being fashionable among the Windy City’s barkeeps.

Baby Face, or so the rumor now went, was said to hang out there. Thus, Sam and Charles, as well as at least twenty Division agents in other cars, all with heavy weapons, sat along the street in anticipation. But, so far, no one had entered or left the place who looked remotely like the gunman, and the two agents inside at the bar hadn’t moseyed out to signal his arrival by means other than the street. It was nearly 4.

“I doubt he’d come this late,” said Sam. “He’s probably all snuggled up to Helen’s bosom about now.”

“When he ain’t killing folks, he’s a real homebody, ain’t he?” said Charles.

“You never thought he’d show, did you, Charles?”

No, Charles did not. The tip hadn’t come from Uncle Phil, so it seemed unlikely to be true. But that was the sort of objection that could not be raised, and so the whole parade was organized, rehearsed, and eventually lumbered into place, for what Charles knew would be a feckless evening.

“I guess I didn’t,” he said.

“Your mysterious ‘cop’ friend from Arkansas, he didn’t confirm, right?”

“It ain’t set up so I can call him. He calls me when he has something. It’s awkward, but it’s for his safety.”

“Charles, as your friend, I’m here to tell you there are many in the office and in Washington who don’t believe your story of the cop in the Chicago Gang Squad giving you info that the squad isn’t going to act on, for various reasons. First off, they aren’t that good. Second of all, we did check, and no one on that squad has an Arkansas background.”

“I may have blurred a few details,” said Charles, “to protect both him and us. I thought it was my call. The info’s been good so far.”

“Good? It’s been great!”

“You want me to stop?”

“God, no. We’re addicted to it. But can you brief me, just so I know where we stand. Off the record, which is why I chose now to bring it up.”

“Sure,” said Charles. He told it quickly: how the judge reached out to him, saying how he knew the boys sometimes needed to place certain info; how that had led to Uncle Phil: how Phil called him when he had hard information.

“Okay,” said Sam, “I think maybe you should write all that down, give it to me in a sealed envelope. I’ll sign it, have it notarized, and put it in my office safe. I don’t think anything will come of it, but I just don’t know how it’s going to play out. That is, unless Baby Face Nelson walks out of The Red Bird this second with his hands up.”

“Helen would never let him do that,” said Charles.

“You’re probably right,” said Sam.

“Now, since we’re talking man up, out of the office, and this subject is here, there’s something I’d like to ask you.”

“I’ll try to answer. Man up.”

“See, to me it seems like it’s foolish of the Italians to rat out the bank boys. The bank boys are getting all the attention, nobody’s doing much to the Italians. It seems like they’d encourage them, especially since they’re not stealing from the Italians. Baby Face is too smart for that.”

“Here’s my thought. They do see long-term, that’s their strength. Not next month, next year, even next decade. They know they’ll be here for keeps. So here’s what they’re doing. Their real target is us. The Division. They’re fighting us, not the bank robbers. They’re only using the bank robbers to get at us.”

Charles said, “I don’t get it. The bank robbers ain’t bringing us down. They’re making us better.”

“That’s it right there. Look at it from their point of view. The Director, who is a political genius, among his many remarkable attributes, is using the ‘crisis’ of the bank robbers to nurture the Division. Look at how we’ve changed in the past eighteen months: we’ve gone from a gaggle of career idiots, like Clegg, and inexperienced kids, like Ed Hollis, to a solid organization. We’ve acquired a reputation; we’ve acquired hundreds of snitches; we’ve learned tactics, techniques, skills, tricks. We’ve gotten powerful weapons like the Thompson in your lap. We’ve found a cadre of brave men who can shoot it out with anybody on the planet and win. Our scientific apparatus is the world’s best, and getting better. We’ve captured the public imagination and now they’re making movies about us, radio shows, and writing books and magazine stories. Boys used to want to be John Dillinger, now they want to be you, though they don’t know who you are so they want to be Mel Purvis. They want to be G-Men.”

“So why are the Italians helping us?”

“Because they know war makes us better and stronger. The longer the war, the better and stronger we get. Just like the army in the Great War. But what happened to the army after the Great War? It got smaller, weaker, less efficient. The good people got bored because there were no interesting fights, budgets were cut, promotions frozen. So they left, looking for more money and a sense of purpose. The army turned into a nest for the hacks, dilettantes, and timeservers, for those with shallow talent but deep ambition. For the Hugh Cleggs of the world. That’s what the Italians want: they want us to be a pathetic little group of hacks and dilettantes, men of shallow talent and deep ambition. They want the Division full of Cleggs, not Swaggers. They want to defeat us in the big war by helping us win the little war.”

50

Rawley stuck his thumb in Braxton’s ribs, bringing his brother jerkily out of a wonderful dream that consisted of Dallas Cowgirl cheerleaders (all of them), white snakeskin Lucchese boots, many quality folks who called him sir, and an Escalade in gold, with gold hubcaps, grille, and aerial.

“Wha! Wha! Wha!” he said, his hands naturally clenching into hammer-like fists, for a poke in the ribs usually meant a fight was oncoming and he always wanted to get the first lick in.

But Rawley just handed him a pair of earphones that ran from the StingRay to which he himself was connected and whose LEDs displayed Bob’s cell number, and immediately, as Braxton pulled the phones on, he heard Swagger’s voice, and a new one.

“A Monitor, you say?” asked the new voice.

“That’s right.”

“Baby Face Nelson’s Monitor?”

“That’s right.”

“Verifiably?”

“I believe elsewhere in the notes it is admitted that Lebman sold Jimmie Smith, a well-known Nelson fake name, a Monitor for four thousand dollars. My grandfather, whose employment in the FBI we can now verify, never claims that it’s Baby Face’s, but the other guns in the cache would almost certainly further verify it. Two Thompsons, a Remington riot gun, a .38 Super, and, not in this cache but from the same source, a .45 automatic that can be verified as the gun that killed Dillinger. Maybe some other assorted Baby Face Nelson handguns that can be verified.”

“All of it untouched since nineteen-when?”

“Nineteen thirty-four, when all this was the news.”

“Well,” said the voice, “on the open market, it might be problematical to move the automatic weapons. The NFA act of course means that all guns had to be registered by 1984, and new ones couldn’t be added. But—”

“But what? Come on, tell me, dammit, Marty.”

“Well…” This Marty seemed suddenly reticent.

“Did he say where this shit was?” asked Braxton, during the pause, and Rawley nodded, scribbled a note, and handed it over.

“He said he figured the map out. The building is a hunting cabin his grandfather owned, his father owned, and he guesses he now owns, in the Ouachita Mountains.”

Braxton nodded.

“Look, without my testimony, you’re in prison,” Swagger said, “and your little scam is the talk of the industry. You’re professionally dead. Plus, you’re getting fucked every night by the Pagan Animals M.C. So I’m thinking, you owe me.”

“All right, all right, Swagger. Well, the thing most people brokering this discovery would do is try and find a museum that would take them so they could be appreciated for their historical significance. It would be a magnificent gesture, earning endless goodwill, and also, assuming the paperwork was carefully handled, a legal one. I’m not sure of the tax ramifications, but I believe a clever accountant could take a substantial deduction for the effort.”

“But that’s small-time and you know it. An operator like you wouldn’t never let a chance to make big bucks go to waste.”

“You’re so critical of me,” said Marty. “You’re so judgmental.”

“Get on with it.”

“Well, there are offshore collectors. Some in South America, some in the Middle East, some in Russia. Men of great wealth and greed with very little interest in trivial legalities.”

“So if you had the guns and the verification, you could do a deal with somebody somewhere — an oil billionaire, a cartel boss, a Russian mobster. How much?”

“I am confident those guns as described, verifiable, untouched since 1934, would be worth in toto no less than three million dollars. The Monitor is the queen of the collection. It would be an amazing addition to anyone’s collection. Three million, cash on the barrelhead. Fast, clean, no records. They’re very liquid. The problem would only be laundering the money, but an astute financial operator could handle it easily. The man in charge would need a rare combination of attributes — contacts, and a reputation in the fine-gun world, where the prices are getting astronomical, plus financial acumen: experience in moving sums around to disguise their origin and at the same time avoid the tax bite. I could name some people if you gave me a few days.”

“Yeah, Marty, get busy on that, will you?”

“I will. Thanks, by the way, for testifying on my behalf.”

“You’d steal the gold from your mother’s teeth on her deathbed, but I never thought for a second you’d be capable of taking part in a murder plot.”

“So harsh,” said Marty. “So harsh.”

With that Swagger broke contact, then called Memphis. It was a short call, just an announcement of his triumph and his plans to recover the treasure, would Nick care to come along?

“You just want me along to do the digging,” said Nick.

“Damned right,” said Swagger. “You got a back that still works.”

“Only on Tuesdays.”

“I can do Tuesday.”

“Hmm, Tuesday, November third, 2038?”

“I’ll write it down,” said Swagger.

“Maybe you ought to contact Treasury first,” said Nick.

“I’ll call my lawyer for advice, I guess. If he says we can put them in a bonded warehouse, or I can get Arkansas State Police to take temporary custodianship, that might work. But I don’t know if they’re there, I want to get that out of the way, and then we’ll see where we are.”

“Good, good.”

“I got to get up there, I figure Jake Vincent and his kids or one of the other Vincents can help me. I got to get a three-wheeler. I can find the place. It ain’t far from Hard Bargain Valley.”

“I do remember Hard Bargain Valley,” said Nick.

“I’ll bet you do. Anyway, this’ll take a little time. I’m aiming for, say, a week from now to get it all set up, the three-wheeler bought, borrowed, or rented, some picks and shovels, maybe a wagon to load the shit on behind the three-wheeler.”

“That would be the fifth,” said Nick.

“Yeah, that’s it. The fifth, write it down. Just for the security, I’ll go and dig the stuff up after dark. Can you go ahead and start talks with the historian? See if the Bureau is interested?”

“Of course.”

“Okay, talk to you later. Got some calls still to make.”

“Congratulations. Maybe the guns will tell us the story of how it all turned out.”

“If it’s worth telling.”

Braxton and Rawley waited, but Swagger evidently decided to put off calling his lawyer until the morning. When the eavesdropping phone relayed the sound of the even breathing of sleep, they disconnected.

“We got it,” said Braxton.

Rawley nodded. They shook hands, and hugged, and then a wolfish smile came across Braxton’s face. He got his own iPhone out and fingered a number.

“I just figured how to smoke a few more bucks out of our fat cat,” he said.

A few rings and the phone was answered.

“Yes? Oh, Christ, it’s late. You woke me up,” said Leon Kaye, from his bedroom in Little Rock.

“You’re about to be very glad I called,” said Braxton.

“Give me a second… Uh, oh, okay, let me get out of the bedroom… Okay, now I’m okay… You have some news?”

“Have I ever!” said Braxton, who then laid out what he had just learned.

At the end of it, Kaye said, “Marion ‘Marty’ Adams, he’s the dealer Swagger called. He plays his game very close to the edge. I don’t know how they know each other, but Adams is exactly the right person. I’m impressed. But, no matter. You know what has to be done?”

“I know what has to be done. Do you know what has to be done?”

“Uh, Braxton, I’m not sure I like your tone.”

“This next step has to be addressed. If we take the guns, but leave Swagger alive, he will hunt us down and hunt you down. That’s what he’s good at. That’s what he does.”

“Hmm,” said Kaye. “I don’t like discussing this.”

“It has to be discussed.”

“What are you proposing?”

“The hole that has the guns, it has to have Swagger in it when we close it up. That costs more. Get it?”

Nothing for a few seconds.

“I’m not sure I…”

“The alternative is a deep swim in an Ozark lake wearing a charm bracelet with a color television on it while the Russians play vodka pissing games in the boat two hundred feet above your head.”

“Do what has to be done.”

“You pay off the Russians, we take everything else. Got it? No profit for you, just survival. Got it?”

“You drive a hard bargain.”

“We are hard men. We do hard things. That’s where the money is.”

“So be it.”

“All right, now you get somebody to get to the deed registration or tax records or plat index, or whatever it is, and you find the precise location of that property in the Ouachita near the National Forest. We have to be there before Swagger. No way in hell a couple triple cheeseburgers like us going to be able to follow him through the woods without him picking up on it.”

“Got it.”

“We have to be there, hunkered down, quiet as mice when he arrives.”

“You’re a little big for a mouse,” said Kaye. “You’re even a little big for triple cheeseburgers.”

51

“I can hardly walk,” said J.P.

“You don’t have to walk. You just have to shoot,” said Les.

“I can’t bend, I can’t twist. I don’t even think I can get my head down to the sights.”

“You can do all those things if you practice. That’s why you have to practice now. So when you use it, it won’t be new, you won’t make mistakes and get yourself killed.”

“I have a better idea. Let’s go to Reno and work for Skabootch, Doc Bone, and the guys. Let’s live to be ninety. We’re going to die for sure, under your plan.”

Helen said, “Les, J.P. has a point. This is insane. Honey, you could get killed so easy. And then—”

“You two, what is this, some sort of plan you cooked up? You’re both against me.”

His voice rose, even if he didn’t mean it to.

They sat in the small, stuffy living room of a tourist cabin off the highway in Melrose Park. It was no swank Aurora Hotel, but it was a good place to go to ground.

Les hit his fist against his chest. The sound produced was a sort of bonk.

“It’ll stop anything up to a .30 caliber, and the Division hardly ever uses its .30s,” he said. “They’ll come at us with Thompsons,45 autos,38s, buckshot, and Super .38s. The steel stops ’em all.”

“I can hardly drive in it,” said J.P.

“Helen can drive. You can drive, can’t you, Helen?”

Les’s wife scrunched up her cute little face, communicating, yet hardly expressing, disagreement, but she yielded to the force of his urgency. “I suppose,” she said.

“Are you putting her in steel?” asked J.P.

“Nobody’s shooting at her.”

“No, but they’re shooting at the car. She’s in the car.”

“Helen will be fine. Nobody shoots women. This stuff saved my life at South Bend,” said Les. “Stopped a pistol shot cold. Otherwise, I’m now drinking with Johnny and Homer in hell’s hottest nightclub.”

The steel armor had been welded together by someone Tony Accardo knew. It was solid, tough, heavy, though less clumsy than the Knights of the Round Table stuff the cops bought from the police ordnance trade, which Les had worn at South Bend. It was like a sandwich board but cut slimmer, a more reasonable silhouette. The front plate had been fabricated off an actual human shape and thus had a bulge in it so that it didn’t bang against the stomach but cupped it instead. But, for comfort, that was the only feature. Each plate weighed fifteen pounds, and they were strapped together by heavy leather. They only extended to the waist, so that pants could be worn beneath, belted tight, while a shirt, tie, and jacket could be worn over. Thirty extra pounds, and if you were upright too long, the straps cut hard into your shoulders, and the whole rig took the energy out of you fast, so that once you survived the fight and your adrenaline was depleted, you were almost flattened by exhaustion. But it was the best rig that could be had, even if it left legs, pelvis, testicles, sides, and head open to incoming fire. The federals were trained to shoot midchest, and in battles they reverted to training, which meant they’d try to put their rounds into Les’s and J.P.’s chests.

“Okay on the vests,” said J.P., finally collapsing to the sofa in the tourist cabin. “The vests aren’t really the problem. The vests make sense, if we do the plan. It’s the plan that doesn’t make sense.”

Les sighed. He loved them both. But they did not see it. They could not grasp it. It was so clear to him. It was what had to be done.

“It’s one thing to go against the Italians,” said J.P. “But to go against the Italians, we first have to go through the Division. Now, I’m not good at counting — ha-ha — but even I can count to two, and that’s all of us, plus Helen, who drives but won’t shoot. Gee, forty Division agents with Thompson guns, maybe three hundred Italians also with Thompson guns: the odds don’t seem much in our favor.”

“Honey, honey, honey, listen to J.P. This is crazy. It’s suicide!”

“We have been betrayed,” said Les. “One of four guys collected dope from all over the region, put it together, and then ratted us out to the Justice Department. He has to be paid back. He murdered men we all loved. That can’t be forgotten, forgiven, postponed. The point has to be made, even to the Italians, that there are certain men who can’t be betrayed.”

“You’re crazy with honor. Are you some kind of knight or something? Where does all this pride and screwball guts come from? I thought you were a bank robber, Les, but you’re some kind of Avenging Angel of the bank robbery religion.”

“Look,” said Les, “the whole point of driving twelve hundred miles and fronting four grand was to get a Monitor. The Monitor is God. We see the Division boys before they see us. If they see us, we put a squirt of .30 into their engine blocks, and they’re out of the fight. That’s the power of the Monitor, but also the fact that it’s easy to handle and easy to manipulate, with that pistol grip and big compensator. We vanish without the car taking a hit. Then we know who it is. Carmine DePalma, North Side. Phil D’Abruzzio, West Side. Alberto Mappa, South Side. Antonio Bastianelli, the Loop. Tony has told us where each guy lives. We wait outside his house, he gets out of his car — or maybe he don’t even get out — we pull up, and I hose him down with the Monitor. That .30 caliber goes through any car like a home run through a window. We turn him to chop suey in five seconds. Then we’re gone. Reno, here we come. They never know who hit ’em until the word reaches them: you fucked with the man they call Baby Face Nelson, and Baby Face Nelson — that is, me, Lester Gillis — I fuck back, twice as hard. But by that time we’re under the auspices and protection of Doc Bone and Skabootch, and there’s nothing they can do about it. And, who knows, maybe thinking at least it’s over, Mr. Nitto gets sloppy. We come back and turn the Monitor on him. The Monitor doesn’t care how big he is, it just cares if he’s alive, because if he’s alive, the Monitor will make him dead.”

“Okay, Les,” said J.P., with a sigh. “I love you — you know that — I’ll go along. Helen loves you too. But at least I don’t have to fuck you like she does.”

52

Cold day. The hawk snapped through Chicago’s harsh streets, lifting a screen of dust, dead leaves, debris, crumpled classified ads, whatever it could move. Grit and sting filled the swift air. Men cowered against the wind’s bite, shivering in thin coats, gathered around garbage cans with flames pouring from them, prayed for spring but knew spring was a long time coming.

Charles looked up and down the street, made sure nobody afoot or in a car had followed him. Nope, clear. He pulled his overcoat tight against the wind and slipped into the place.

It wasn’t much. A Windy City bar and grill, largely empty at this hour, its government-green walls awash with heatless sunlight, a few thigh-and-garter calendars on the walls, a beefy thumper of a bartender. This one was called The Paragon, a little west of the Cubs’ now empty ballpark called Wrigley Field. He looked around, saw a face nodding his way from one of the dark booths in the rear, nodded in return, and headed over.

“Okay,” said Dave Jessup of the Chicago Herald-Examiner, “pigs do star in movies. You did me a favor, now I do you a favor.”

“We’ll see how you handle the Irish boyos that run this town, and particularly those that wear blue. I know how the Irish mind works. The cops, especially the big shots, they’re loud, and they brag and shove and throw a punch, and they have big bellies, red noses, and a fondness for the pint, but that’s all bluster. Inside, they’re clever and cunning, and they pay attention. That’s why they run all the cities in America and three-quarters of the towns.”

“I hear you,” said Jessup.

“What that means is that somewhere in that big new building at State and Eleventh, they have what they probably call The Italian File. Or maybe they call it The Wop File. Everything they know about the Italians — how they work, who they know, what they make, what their plans are, how much they pay, who they kill, and, most of all, who they are — all that’s in there. But it’s not open for anybody but the top people, and access is guarded. They sure won’t share it with Justice, or, if they will, they’ll very carefully pick out what they give, and they’ll never give the full story.”

“You want in? Why not use the badge, go all official-like?”

“See, if I go to my boss, and he goes to Commissioner Allman, and he goes to his cardinals, and they talk about it, play it, test it, consider it, finally, eventually, some kind of tit for tat is arranged, and six months from now I’ll get a peep at a small part of it. But every Italian in the city will know a Justice man is looking at them, they’ll know who he is, they’ll know all about him, and they’ll start paying attention to him, as they try to figure out whether or not to squish him.”

“Probably an accurate summary.”

“But then there’s Dave Jessup, Chicago Herald-Examiner, smart-ass, big mouth, wiseguy. He knows the system, he’s studied it hard, knows where the skeletons are: who’s smart, who’s dumb, who’s strong, who’s weak, who drinks, who don’t, who can be touched and for how much. He knows how to operate, to pull in favors, to flatter the strong, to scare the weak, to rub on the magic lantern until out pops what I want.”

“I might know a little something.”

“I bet. Here’s how I want you to use it. I want somebody to go through The Italian File. It’s too big to move, and I could never get into the room anyway.”

“You want him to take it out? It must be gigantic!”

“No, of course not. But I want him to pull the file on everyone named Phil. It’s a common name among the Italians. There’s probably at least a dozen, but I don’t think there’s so many, it would take a crate to get them out. Pull them and get them to me. Maybe I’m in a car across the street. Give me an hour with them, that’s all I need. I’m only interested in one Phil. He knows me; it’s time I should know him. A photo of him attached to a bill of particulars would do the trick. Do you get it?”

“I do.”

“Can you make this happen?”

“It’s doable. The head of Gang Intelligence has a very nice summer cottage with six bedrooms in Petoskey, Michigan. Everybody knows. The story is, he bought it with money inherited from his wife’s father, one Seamus O’Sullivan. However, what I know that nobody else knows is that Seamus O’Sullivan was a drunken firefighter in Peoria, Illinois, who died when his future wife was thirteen. Believe me, he doesn’t want anybody else to know that.”

“You play hardball. I like that.”

“I do. And if all this should put those files in your hands for a bit, what would be the benefit for reporter Jessup?”

“When I kill Baby Face, you’ll be the first to know.”

53

Les checked his watch. It was 4:30, getting dark. A cold wind blew in from the lake, but that was nothing new. His topcoat was tight, his scarf tight, his hat tight, his gloves tight — but he still felt the clammy chill of late Midwest fall.

“They ain’t coming,” said J.P. from the front seat. “They wouldn’t come this late, they don’t want to do it at night, and the sun is almost gone.”

“Les,” said Helen, behind the wheel, “he’s right. This is not the time, this is not the place.”

Les didn’t say a thing. He had the Colt Monitor across his lap, and, as usual, proximity to such an interesting, powerful weapon had him slightly jazzed. He didn’t want to give up on this place, he wanted to shoot, send a few Division cars into the gutter, trailing flame and smoke. He was also encased in his steel girdle, and though the seat supported the weight, the tightness of it and its coldness was discomfiting.

But it was indeed getting dark fast. Shadows lengthened across Route 42 on the northern outskirts of the small industrial city just beyond Chicago-commuting range, and the parking lot to the A&P was practically deserted, as most of Waukegan’s homemakers had gotten their supplies for hubby’s dinner and long since bolted for home. Across the street, a cheap motor hotel called the Acme had turned on its flashing-white-star road sign but had attracted no business yet.

He had to face it.

“Okay,” he said. “Helen, rev it up. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Okay if I put the Thompson down?” said J.P. “The goddamned thing is heavy and it’s squashing my balls… Excuse me, Helen.”

“Don’t talk dirty in front of Helen,” said Les.

“It’s all right, baby,” said Helen, as she eased the car into traffic. “J.P. was just being funny.”

“Ha-ha — I forgot to laugh. No, hold on to it. You don’t know, maybe they’re laying a few blocks off and want to jump us unawares… Hell, this thing is twice as heavy as that one.”

“Yeah, but you like it. Holding it makes you happy. It does, doesn’t it, Helen?”

“He does sort of like it,” said Helen.

The crew was getting rebellious. It was no fun sitting in a car in a parking lot on a frosty fall day in a crummy noplace like Waukegan waiting for Division gunmen to roll in. The steel was cold against their flesh; the heavy guns dented their muscles, giving off odors of lubricant, not a problem in short spells but hard to take after eight hours; and the thermos had run dry at 3, meaning they’d been without hot coffee just as the weather was turning bitter. And being this close to the lake meant the wind was windier and the cold was colder.

“All right,” he said, “we cross DePalma off the list. Tony told his number one guy that he’d heard from me, I was hanging out in Waukegan at the Acme, casing a job in Lake Bluff. If DePalma was our spy, he’d have ratted us out to the Division and we’d have gotten a batch of them today, and him tonight, and be on our way to Reno.”

“No to DePalma: I hear you. I want this done so I don’t have to wear this armor stuff ever again, but somehow I wasn’t in a machine-gun-battle-to-the-death mood today.”

“I’m always in a machine-gun-battle-to-the-death mood,” said Les.

They coursed down 42, finally reaching the civilized sectors of the North Shore, whose stylizations put humble Waukegan to shame. Now the road was called by the classier name of Sheridan, and it took them past big houses along the lakefront where the millionaires lived — Lake Forest, Highland Park, Winnetka, Kenilworth — all before reaching modest but pleasant Wilmette. There was even a casino in a little unincorporated area between Kenilworth and Wilmette called No-Man’s-Land, but its temptations were lost on the task-focused Les.

“Helen, turn your lights on. Yeah, J.P., put the gun down, keep your finger off the trigger, and don’t blow any holes in anything.”

“Agh,” said J.P., sliding the Thompson delicately to the floor of the automobile. He managed to do it without sending fifty hardballs into the door.

“That doesn’t mean go to sleep,” said Les. “Keep your eyes open, keep on the scan. Helen, watch that speed, we don’t want to be pulled over by some small-town clown cop. He’d see the guns and we’d have to dump him.”

“Yes, yes, yes, Your Majesty,” said Helen.

Traffic was thin, and so was conversation.

Pulling into Evanston, Helen suddenly found a topic.

“Say, honey,” she said. “You know, suppose the Division had showed. Bang, bang, bang—lots of bullets winging. The ones they fire at us—”

“They aren’t going to fire at us. We jump ’em first and put ’em out of the fight. That’s the plan.”

“But plans never work. So the bullets they fire at us, they go on into that A&P — housewives, kids, old people — is that a good idea? It gets the newspapers all twisted against us. And it gets some little children killed.”

“Helen, this is what we do. You know this is what we do.”

“She has a point,” said J.P.

“Another country heard from,” said Les.

“You’re sort of loved, like Johnny. Especially now that you’re number one and you’ve got such a cool name. You’re a hero for a lot of bitter folks — that is, until you machine-gun a baby in a carriage.”

The prospect of a dead baby didn’t engage Les a bit; instead, he turned to an old slight, and he heated up fast. “I should have been number one before Charlie Floyd. I don’t know why they… Anyway, what’s the point?”

“All he’s saying,” said Helen, “is that getting civilians killed doesn’t do us any good. You have to risk it for a bank, because the banks are where they are, downtown or on Main Street. But if we get to pick the spot, let’s pick a spot where Mr. and Mrs. America aren’t buying their Ann Page biscuits for Sunday dinner.”

Les grumped up, locked his eyes off in the distance, and turned to stone. He said nothing, as they reached Dempster in South Evanston for their western turn, then left — southwest — on Niles Center Road, angling toward Melrose Park. America rolled numbly by, the other America, not theirs, as they’d gone outlaw, gone for flash, spurts of pure adrenaline, fast profit, lots of cash, pix in the rags, but death always looking over their shoulders. It was okay, except when they rolled by a cemetery on the right and that got Les to feeling mortal instead of immortal (it happened occasionally) and he said, “Hey, look at that.”

“I hear they have dead people in there,” said J.P.

“All of ’em,” said Helen.

“When it’s time, drop me there,” said Les, squinting at the sign as the headlights scanned them. “St. Peter’s, a Catholic place, would make Ma happy.”

“Nobody’s killing you,” said J.P.

“When you get that in writing, let me know,” said Les.

But both Helen and J.P. knew that if he suddenly jumped off topic, Les had reached a decision.

Finally, he said, “We’ll do the Como Inn, Lake Geneva, next. That’s off by itself in the woods. No babies die because Mommy had to have Ann Page biscuits!”

54

Arkansas 88: it was the road of his life, same as it ever was. Well, almost; he passed the old place where he’d been raised, where he’d waved good-bye to his father for the last time on the last day of 1955, neither of them knowing it, and saw the familiar land now going through some process called development where new houses rose like ghosts against the fields he’d once roamed with a .22 hunting rabbits. He felt nothing but the cash in his pocket the place had finally deposited.

Beyond that came a nowhere village called Ink, still just a spot in the road, with a convenience store now run by hardworking Koreans, and beyond that to another nowhere place called Nokana, neither place figuring much in a childhood that was drawn west to the county seat, called Blue Eye, where Sam Vincent, in a sort of way, had become his father after 1955; and he’d gone to high school, been an athlete of note, if still enduring the stares that said “Poor Bob Lee, he’s Earl’s boy. You know, Earl got killed in 1955” until he could stand it no more and left, on the first day of the rest of his life, for Parris Island on his sixteenth birthday in 1962. So this flat stretch of road to Mount Ida, and then Hot Springs, meant nothing until he reached a certain turnoff and headed north, into the green bulk of the mountains in front of him.

He rose, he rose, he rose against the incline, past the trees, in Jake Vincent’s SUV, towing a rented Honda Recon, a four-wheel all-terrain vehicle that resembled a Harley after ten years’ worth of six-hundred-pound dead lifts and squats. At a certain point, the road quit. He parked, unhitched the Honda, opened the rear of the SUV, and removed a shovel, a pick, a crowbar, and a backpack containing a heavy flashlight newly primed with lithium batteries, six protein bars, four bottles of water, and a hunting knife, and secured all to the Recon cargo space by bungee cord.

He checked his watch. The sun was low in the west, pitching bright beams vertically in the west, the glow turning the edges of the ruffled clouds fiery. He took his iPhone out of his jacket — though still summer, it grew cold in the night the higher you went — and called Nick.

“I’m at road’s end, just about to head into the woods.”

“What do you figure?” asked Nick.

“An hour. But most of it’s uphill. I’ll be all right.”

“Call in every hour. I’ll alert the State cops if you miss two in a row.”

“Old lady! There ain’t another human within a hundred square miles.”

“That’s what they all say.”

He climbed aboard the Honda, turned the key, and it roared to life.

Braxton listened.

They heard the phone go off, even if the microphone didn’t. Put in a pocket, all its information was muffled. Then, softer, the crank of the Recon engine could be heard, the change in pitch as it went into gear, and the thumpa-thumpa of the man negotiating the mechanical billy goat over trails meant for bipeds. That was all.

“Okay,” said Braxton. “An hour. All we got to do is wait.”

Rawley nodded.

“Let’s go to the masks. I don’t want to be putting them on when he’s here.”

The two balaclavas came out; each man pulled his over his head, until his face was but a black blank with eye slots.

“Now the kit.”

“The kit” was a hypodermic needle, loaded with 50ccs of sodium pentothal — truth serum. The point wasn’t the truth. The point was to inject Bob fast and put him under. He’d be asleep for forty-eight hours, wake up with a hangover, fuzzy memories, inchoate fury, and no idea what had happened. They’d be long gone, the guns long gone, maybe in Mexico by that time, and they’d be three million dollars richer, in cash, and it would be another week or so before clown-ass Leon Kaye figured out they hadn’t killed him, just knocked him out chemically, even if Leon had paid for the full hit.

“I ain’t killing that guy,” Braxton had said to Rawley, who nodded in agreement. “He’s a hero. I don’t kill heroes. Bad for the reputation. It would be like killing LeBron.”

Still, if they had to, they could: Braxton had a Serbu shorty, a Remington 870 cut down to a total of eighteen inches, with a pistol grip fore at the pump and aft behind the trigger guard, with a SureFire WeaponLight aboard, laser-equipped to put a bright red dot on any area that was about to get carpet-bombed by double-aught buckshot. At close range, it would blow a hole in a whale. Then there was Rawley with his Smith & Wesson .500 revolver. It was a giant framed wheel gun with a magic half-inch bore width that launched Double Tap 350-grain XPD buffalo stoppers at about 3,032 pounds muzzle energy. What it hit invariably returned to its pure atomic state. It too was guided toward accuracy by electronic application, another fine item from the SureFire inventory, a laser unit that projected the same red dot of destruction on anything it was aimed at. In both cases, the red dots were enough to end any argument without difficulty.

They had been helicoptered in on the other side of the mountain, moved by compass through the night with surprising grace and stealth for such big men, and set up, Imodium-prepped and diapered for urination issues, by dawn. They had not moved an inch all day and rarely said anything, as Rawley monitored the StingRay cell site simulator in his backpack for progress reports and read a well-thumbed paperback of Borges’s Labyrinths. Braxton dreamed of the Dallas Cowgirl cheerleaders and a solid-gold Escalade, squished ants, ate energy bars, pissed in his diapers, and kept saying, over and over, “Three million dollars.”

He tried not to have a memory-wallow when he pulled in. The foundations still stood, as they were stone. But the timber, unmaintained, had yielded in large part to rot. One wall remained erect, though it looked creaky, and part of another wall, though angled toward collapse and buttressed only by rotting slats. The interior was gutted, most of the floorboards broken, and tendrils had begun to insinuate their way through cracks, gaps, fissures, and collapse. It had the stink of the old and disused. Dust and spiderwebs and dead leaves and vegetative debris lay everywhere.

Against his will, he remembered otherwise: when the cabin was whole, when it was painted green, when his father and Sam Vincent and various other men had hunted there every fall. Rustic, never chic, it never leaked, held the warm in, the cold out. It had once had a porch where the men would sit after the day’s hunting, drinking bourbon, smoking cigars, telling stories, enjoying everything, but most of all enjoying being men. Much laughter while the boys were off in the yard, cleaning the deer, learning the responsibilities of the hunt that Field & Stream never wrote about. Then, when they were done, the boys might sit together in the lee of the porch, listening to the men talk, about politics, baseball, Razorback football, sometimes the war, though Earl never said a word on that subject and was never asked, as all respected the harshness of his five-island ordeal against the Japanese.

Now ruin and decay, the past. Dust and dead leaves of a distant cosmos. Untouched by human hands in decades. Again, he was good at repressing, the essential sniper talent, and so he finally tossed those memories down a hole somewhere in his brain.

He reverted to task. Consulting the map, he immediately found the ragged wall of foundation that corresponded to the diagram, found next the window well, which was the starting spot. He’d measured, found the degrees of northwest direction from the corner of the window well to be 43, and, using a compass, established that as his line of march. The dashes on the map had to be steps, and as there were fourteen of them, he walked fourteen and, just as the map indicated, came to the trunk of an elm. The elm was still there, still magnificent, and would outlast him, as it had outlasted Earl and, before him, Charles. It was stately, magnificent, calm, unperturbable, still leafy and healthy.

Now he stepped around it, tracked five more steps outward on the same line, and stood where X marked the spot.

Digging is never any fun, unless you’re clinically insane or have an IQ of about 34. Neither of those conditions applied to Swagger. But it gets even worse if you’re seventy-one and have been shot thirteen times, cut badly once, waterboarded, and are currently working your way through artificial hip number two. Still, he did what he had to do, and the light went away, the forest grew still.

He found a rhythm for the pick, with which he scrambled the hard topsoil and scruff vegetation and weeds to clods and lumps and grit, all of it easily movable by shovel. The shoveling also demanded not only rhythm but more back, and though the work never quite achieved the threshold of sheer torture, it was never less than profoundly unpleasant. The hip was okay, being relatively new to his body, but his lower back sang an aria of hurt on each downstroke, and his chest issued squeaks of distress. The pile beside the hole grew, as did the hole itself, and as usual it seemed to violate all the rules of physics, including relativity, that such a vast heap should be drawn from such a tiny penetration.

The sun disappeared totally, and though it was not strictly necessary, he set up his big light to illuminate the task that remained. He’d always been a worker and allowed himself no lollygagging, took five off in sixty and one sip of bottled water, and kept at it till it seemed he ought to be done, unless the old bastard had gotten all the way to China and stashed it there.

In the next moment, he felt the thud of striking something hard and vibratory, surely wood. Bingo!

But still another two hours remained, even if being on the downslope of the task filled him with energy, dulled his hurting, cooled his brow, dried his sweat. On and on and on it went until at last he’d excavated what the light revealed to be a coffin.

God, I hope there ain’t no body in it.

It seemed unnecessary to actually remove the dirt that packed the bottom half of the box. Instead, he went hard at it with the pick, chopping, loosening, reducing its adhesion, and more or less freed the base of the structure from the earth that had claimed it all these years. The next issue was pulling it upward and out, and once he got it over the eighteen-inch lip of the trench, it was all right. It took all he had left in chest and arms but, in the end, wasn’t as formidable as a body might have been, since, as he totaled it, it had to be less than fifty pounds’ worth of weight.

And, finally, it was there, in the bright blaze of the light’s spot. A coffin, wooden, crusted, and stained, but evidently still intact, having yielded to no incursion over the years. The old man must have shellacked it, or slathered the Cosmoline on, or whatever, amplifying the Georgia pine’s toughness and resistance to the encroachment of moisture.

He got the crowbar, worked it under the nailed lid, and pushed. The wood yielded an inch, so he repeated this process around the edge of the box, and finally the lid raised a bit, loosened on its nails. He drove the bar in deeper, applied full strength, and with the creak of wood relinquishing its grip on nails the lid lifted a few degrees more. He repeated the same drill up and down the box. Finally, a mighty yank, and the thing stood opened.

He snatched the light to examine the treasure. Hmm, it was a batch of tightly wrapped bundles in oilcloth, each secured by an enthusiastic abundance of woven cord. He selected one that seemed the most promising by shape and weight, cut through the cord with his knife, unrolled the bundle and laid it bare to see before him Baby Face Nelson’s Monitor.

There it was, though glutinous, almost luminescent, in the freaky light, with gobs of Cosmoline, that miracle grease that protects metal against all comers for years and years and centuries, oozing off it, out of its openings, dribbling and melting. Bob couldn’t believe it. He pulled it out. By god, it was indeed the thing itself.

The familiar contours of the base Browning Automatic Rifle, though lighter at sixteen pounds than the familiar Marine Corps twenty, the incredible density of the piece, all evident, even if the magazine well was empty. He checked the geegaws that made it a Monitor instead of a BAR, and sixteen pounds instead of twenty: the shorter barrel, the shorter buttstock, and, most peculiar of all, the pistol grip descending from the trigger guard on the underside of the receiver. Only the Space Cadet compensator was missing, and that was in his pocket.

At that moment the world flashed to red, as a laser dot hit him in his eye, knocking his night vision to crazyworld. He blinked to clear away the dazzle, and when he got some focus back, he saw the dot nesting on his chest. He tracked the beam back forty yards to a scruff of brush. Then another light blinked to vivid and nailed him in the chest, holding solid and still.

“You’re busted, sniper,” came the call. “Freeze! Hands on head, knees on ground. All the slack’s out of my trigger. I don’t want to kill you, but you’re about six ounces and a twitch from it, so don’t move a whisper.”

A black shape behind one of the beams detached itself from the earth and came at him. He felt a hand quickly slip inside his coat, and the 157345C, cocked and locked on hardball, came out and was set aside. The gunman moved away, keeping the red dot plastered on the side of Swagger’s head.

The other shape came over, setting himself up close enough not to miss, but too far to be taken down by a fast move. These boys were professionals. Two large men, but not fatties, more like pro-football players of the linebacker variety, their faces hidden by balaclavas.

“Thanks for digging the guns up for us,” said one of them. “Now, you take it easy, you get out of this alive. We know you’se a tricky motherfucker, full of surprises, but don’t you be doing no fancy work on us or you will die regretting it. We are pros.” They sat him down on the edge of the hole he had dug, and one of them pulled a smallish leather case out of his jacket.

“We just gonna zip you full of sodium p and take the treasure out of here. When you wake up two days from now—”

But then he froze. There was a red dot on his chest.

“Drop the guns, fat boys. I got M4 rock and roll on you. And I’m eager to shoot.”

It was Nick Memphis, emerging from the rubble of the cabin with his carbine tight to shoulder.

The two fat things abandoned their weapons, which fell like ingots to the earth. Their hands came up.

“Joke’s on you, chubbo,” said Swagger, picking up his grandfather’s pistol. “You thought you were hunting me. All the time, I was hunting you.”

55

Charles had a briefcase full of pistols and revolvers, plus ammunition. He had a Colt .45 Government Model, a Colt Super .38 Government Model, a Smith & Wesson .38 Special Military & Police, a .38/44 Heavy Duty Smith & Wesson, a Colt Official Police .38 Special, and, finally, a Colt Detective Special .32.

He thought Sam, who had finally agreed to a shooting session, would end up with the Super .38, if he could just get the loading and cocking down. It was the easiest to shoot, had the least recoil, was more powerful than all except the .45. Many of the younger men — Ed Hollis, for one — carried them. He thought the safety, absent on the revolvers, would improve Sam’s confidence. He just had to commit to the cocked-and-locked carry mode and condition himself to the easy-as-pie downstroke on the safety lever as a part of the draw. He was worried Sam would opt for the dick special in the banker’s caliber,32, because it was light, smallish, and had even less recoil than the Super. Unfortunately, it had less power, and small guns with small sights are notoriously hard to shoot well. They’re for men who carry much but shoot little.

Sam was testy that morning, evasive and unsettled. Charles had never seen him so restless or irritable. On the six-block walk from the Bankers Building to the Chicago Police Headquarters Building at State and 11th, where Charles had reserved a booth at the shooting range, he said nothing, just grimly poked his way through the fall crowds that thronged the Loop, his topcoat tight, his scarf tight, his hat pressed down to his ears. He seemed like a grumpy insurance salesman.

Finally, they reached the big cop building, and Sam turned to Charles before they crossed the last street.

“Look, we have to have a talk, okay? Come on, let’s get a drink. Mormon exception granted by the nearest Elder, who happens to be me. Come on.”

They crossed the street and halfway down the block found a darkened place called Skip’s. They went to a deserted booth and took a seat. Skip himself ambled over in time, agreed to fetch two drafts, and did. They were the only customers.

Sam took a good big swallow.

“Are you all right, Sam?” asked Charles.

“Not really,” said Sam.

“Can I help or anything?”

“Not really,” said Sam, taking another swig.

“Look,” he finally said, “I’m going to be honest with you. Nobody’s really figured it out, but I seem to be out of wiggle room.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The guns.”

“The guns?”

“They scare the hell out of me. I don’t even like to be around them. You never see me in the arms room. If you notice, I sort of wander away when the discussion turns to shooting. I’ve been ducking you on this one for months now. I just don’t think I can do it.”

“Sam, they’re just tools. They don’t have brains, blood, feelings, souls. They don’t wear a certain size shoe or favor red ties over blue, are Catholic instead of Protestant.”

“Yes, yes, it’s silly. And silly as it is, it’s still not even the truth. Excuse me for unburdening myself. The guns are only the first part of it. It’s a bigger problem: I’m a coward.”

“Nobody’s a coward,” said Charles. “You just have to find something to fight for, that’s all.”

“No, I’m the real thing. I’m your first coward.”

“Sam, I—”

“Poor Charles. You can’t even imagine such a thing, can you? This must be so baffling to a man of your natural courage.”

“I get scared every time,” he said, even if it wasn’t true.

“Not like I do. I get physically sick, my hands shake, I can’t breathe right, and I hear a voice screaming, ‘Run! Run! Get the hell out of here!’ I backed down from at least ten fights as a kid.”

“As a kid, you were too smart to fight for the bullshit kids fight for: reputation, a gal, to get back at Jack for what he said. Damned few things worth fighting for, you saw that. I was in a whole war that wasn’t worth fighting. But some things are, and if that day comes, you’ll be fine.”

“I’m only here because I liked the ‘scientific’ part of the Division. I had a talent for organization and administration. I like making the calls, moving the parts around, solving the puzzle. It’s endlessly fascinating. But the joke’s on me: I ended up in the middle of a battlefield! The last place I wanted to be!”

“The battle’s almost over,” said Charles. “And if you don’t mind me pointing it out, I think you won it.”

“Charles, you’re trying to put it in such a good light. I opted out of every possible violent episode over the past five months. I wasn’t at Little Bohemia. I was across the street and down the block at the Biograph. You went to St. Paul, not me. You went to East Liverpool, not me. I am so glad I found you. I knew I’d chicken out, and the best thing I did was find a surrogate with guts.”

“I don’t know any such thing. I ain’t heard nobody say such a thing, and if he did, he’d have me to meet in the alley. You shoot a bit, you’ll see the guns ain’t dramatic. They ain’t. A bit. You get used to them. After a few hundred rounds, they’re just things. I see that all the time. These young guys, they get such a charge the first time, they think they’re Billy the Kid, and the second time they notice guns are heavy, greasy, dirty, they rip your clothes, and, if you don’t watch it, make your ears ring for the rest of your life.”

“Charles, you are so forgiving. But I think I need a psychiatrist, not a man killer.”

“What I really am is a range officer, and I can talk you through it. That’s all you need, is a good range officer. To hell with the witch doctors. I will say this with pride: I am the best range officer in the world, and have taught many a man the drill, and when he does the drill, the drill gets him through the fight. Saw it happen a hundred times in the war, saw it happen here, and, by god, I will get you over this.”

It worked out. Sam didn’t set any records, but, guided by Charles’s gravity and precision and confidence, he found himself more or less comfortable, and, as Charles predicted, took easiest to the Colt Super, and while he’d never whack out the center of a bull’s-eye target, in a hundred fifty rounds he’d learned to keep the holes pretty much in the center of the silhouette at fifty feet. It was the same for him as anyone, not magic but an orderly process: front sight, press, recover, front sight, press.

“Well, maybe there’s some hope for me yet,” said Sam, weirdly relieved after the session, as they headed back. “I think I could even do it again.”

“Next week, same time, same place,” said Charles. “In a couple months we’ll have you blazing away with a Thompson gun.”

“That’s graduate school. I’m years from that. Look, I feel good now. Let me buy you a drink. A real drink. We have something to celebrate. I insist.”

“I try not to drink the hard stuff.”

“Make an exception this one time, that’s an order. What harm can it do?”

Three shots in, Sam got a little carried away.

“Don’t you see? When we get the Baby Face thing settled, I’ll be returned to Washington. The Director will be in my corner. My hope would be to get you seconded to training, and eventually put in charge of our firearms unit. Charles, you could implement your ideas. You could make our boys the best shooters in the world and our reputation so sterling that nobody would fight us. The better our reputation, the fewer men we have to kill.”

Charles didn’t agree. If his knowledge of the world held water, there’d always be men who needed killing and men who had to kill them. But he said nothing, just sat there, as bottled up as if a cork were plugging his mouth.

“Charles, you go to the East, you have a big, secure job, a big, secure house, you contribute to society, you save lives, you get attention for your second boy, your wife isn’t so sullen and withdrawn, you give your first boy something extraordinary to return to from the banana wars — my god, Charles, what a life you will have had! Few men have had such a life!”

“It sounds pretty good,” said Charles, the booze reaching him too.

“Charles, why are you so glum? I can tell, you don’t believe a word I’m saying, and you think I’m a fool for saying it.”

“It ain’t you, Sam. I do appreciate your faith in me. I want so bad to get help for that boy. But what you predict, it ain’t gonna happen. I just know it.”

“Charles, why do you say that? Why are you so pessimistic, so down on yourself?”

“There’s things about me you don’t know. Nobody knows. But they hold me back. God is punishing me for my failings. He’s warning me to know my place and to stay in it.”

Why was he so loose of tongue? Was it the booze, Sam’s unfettered admiration, a particularly bad line of nightmares, anxiety over Baby Face, worried about how deep he was now in with Uncle Phil?

“Why, Charles, I’ve never heard such nonsense.”

“You yourself called it a death wish.”

“Yes, but you can make it go away. You have made extraordinary progress. You are out of your shell, a success in the big city, an object of respect for the whole community. What on earth could assail you?”

He paused. Then he just said it.

“I dream of lying with men,” he said.

Sam sure hadn’t seen that one coming. He looked like he’d been hit in the mouth with a tuna. He sat back, his expression reflecting his shock, his emptiness of word or emotion, his inability to respond.

Charles looked at him, appalled though he was at spilling his deepest secret. He’d never said it before, out loud. He’d never even put it into words. It just happened in his dreams, or in those blurry moments before he fell into sleep and his subconscious momentarily took over his conscious.

“I don’t—” said Sam, then stopped.

The rest came out, the whole thing.

“I ain’t never done it,” said Charles. “I don’t know why I want it so. But, goddammit, it’s there, and God is punishing me for it. He took my son’s mind as a warning. He made me good at killing so I’d always be apart. He made me sick and ashamed of myself and what goes on in my mind. So that’s my secret, and that’s why all that fine-sounding stuff you say ain’t ever coming true, Sam. Sorry, if you now disrespect me, but I have to keep you from backing the wrong horse.”

“Oh, Lord,” said Sam.

“It’s even worse now. I heard there’s a place in Hot Springs that could take care of me for more money than it ought to be worth. Ain’t been there, but, damn, I want to go. Got it all figured out. Thought and thought and come up with the idea to tell my wife I was going to the Caddo Gap Baptist Prayer Camp to pray to God to help me with my drinking, so I’d be gone overnight. My wife don’t know no Baptists, so she’d never say, ‘Oh, how’s Charles doing?’ and get ‘Who’s Charles?’ as a response. Don’t think nobody would recognize me, but I do realize I’d be risking everything. But, goddammit, I can’t help wanting what I want.”

Sam thought a while. Then, finally, he said, “I don’t disrespect you at all, Charles. In fact, now I respect you more. The weight you carry, the dignity with which you carry it. Charles, listen to me, I can help you, I will help you. This doesn’t have to be permanent. I just have to show you the way and it’s the sort of thing I can do. I had a case like it in Hawaii and I helped that man, and I can help you. It just takes trust on your part, and commitment. Charles, you have to know: there is hope. There is hope.”

Charles finished his fourth shot.

Sam said again: “There is hope, Charles. I can help you. It’ll be our bargain with each other. You help me with the guns and make me courageous, I’ll help you with your secret pain. I’ll be better, you’ll be better. You’ve already taken the hardest step, which is acknowledgment and unburdening. Now at last you’re ready to progress, and I’m here to help you.”

No one had ever made such an offer to him before, and Charles smiled tightly.

“Well,” he said, “if you can show me the way, it would mean a hell of a lot. It would mean everything. Been lost in the goddamned forest too long.”

When they got back to the office, it was deserted except for the hardworking Ed Hollis, cleaning guns, and a few guys spread throughout the squad room in pools of light, working through phone lists. Troutmouth Clegg had long since gone home, Purvis was on an inspection tour to keep his yap as far from the newspapermen as possible, and most of the others had gone home to wife, kids, girlfriends, dormitory, or movies.

Sam left soon, and Charles helped Ed clean the guns he and Sam had fired. They had a good time chumming around until finally, the guns logged in, Ed departed.

Charles went into his own office, just to make a last check. He was hungry to get home because he had a very solid feeling he’d sleep without nightmares tonight.

He picked up the phone.

He heard the operator putting the call through, heard the connection up and down the line, then the phone ringing — was she there? — and finally she answered and told the operator she’d take the call.

“Charles? Is something the matter?”

“No, things are fine,” he said. “I just wanted to check in, that’s all. Is there any news?”

“None of it good. He’s taken to burning himself with cigarettes. I think I got them away from him, but it’s getting harder and harder. This child is really disturbed. It breaks my heart.”

“I hope I have good news,” he said. “You just have to hold out a little longer. I got a fellow here who believes in me, he can help me — us — in all sorts of ways. I’m seeing a move to a big house in Washington, D.C., a job doing what I’m good at and for a good purpose, I see help for Bobbie Lee, Eastern help, the best doctors, and maybe a good place where they’ll work with him and he won’t feel like a monster.”

“Oh, Charles, if only—”

“Make Earl proud, maybe my success would help him in the Marine Corps, if that’s what he wants to do.”

“Charles, how can such a thing happen?”

“It’s my boss, Sam Cowley. You never met a finer man. I can’t wait for you to meet him. Sweetie, I think this thing is almost done up here and then we can move on. I promise you, I will take care of things and be the man you thought you were marrying.”

“Oh, Charles.”

“You will see, honey. I will make this happen.”

He hung up, feeling a weight gone at last from his shoulders. But then it all changed. A memo was lying on his desk. He picked it up, recognizing Elaine’s handwriting.

“Uncle Phil called. He says don’t bother to call him back, but the word is in: Lake Como Inn, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, later this week.”

56

Swagger got the flex-cuffs tight on each of the big boys, did a quick body search, coming up with several knives and, in each left boot, a small backup sidearm, a Kimber Solo 9mm, and an S&W Bodyguard, all of which he tossed away. Then he turned them around and sat them down where they had sat him, on the lip of the trench he had excavated to free the guns.

Nick came over, having retrieved the main hardware, the Serbu shorty and the Smith .500.

“Wow,” he said, “big-time ordnance. These goobers must have been hunting buffalo and just bumbled into you. I bet that’s their story too.”

“Okay,” Swagger said, “let’s see who these mystery gents are.”

He snatched the two balaclavas off to reveal broad, heavy-boned faces of no particular distinction under a frost of stubbly hair. They looked tough, that’s all, one with a broken nose that spread across his face, the other with a filigree of stitch scars running from the corner of his mouth to his ear. Both had gray eyes, not surprised, not frightened, not engaged. They just regarded him sullenly.

“So,” said Nick, “Thuggis Americanus—what, two hundred forty apiece? — look at those mugs, like both these guys were hit in the face by gorillas with trailer hitches and neither of them particularly noticed. They did go to the doctor… two weeks later.”

Swagger opened the wallets.

“Grumley, no less. The foot soldiers of the criminal South. Law’s been fighting them two hundred years, including my grandfather, my father, and me. You too. Remember Bristol. That was all Grumley.”

“Were those your brothers or cousins or kids? Or can you tell ’em apart?”

The two big guys exchanged glances, rolled their eyes, and settled back into their obdurate silence.

“They’re skip tracers,” said Bob, examining the credential. “Bonded-by-the-state, legally armed man hunters. Tough game. Takes a hard man. Lots of physical stuff. Guy doesn’t want to come along, they have to convince him.”

“Okay,” said Nick. “Let’s see. Start with conspiracy to felony, armed robbery itself, unlawful use of firearms in the commission of a crime — I’m figuring at least fifteen, maybe twenty. Plus, I’m guessing that all over the state there are cops and prosecutors with particular grudges, waiting to pile on with this and that. So they’ll do hard time, and find themselves among many of the guys they sent up and whose skulls they busted. They’re tough, no doubt about it, but I think their years in prison will prove highly stimulating.”

He leaned close, shined a light in each set of sullen eyes.

“Anything to say, gents?”

They just looked at him.

“All right,” he said. “I’m calling the State Police. Once I do that and troopers are dispatched, it’s legal, it’s on the record, and there’s no turning back. The system takes over and it does with you what it wants.”

One of them laughed. Then the other.

Nick shook his head sadly, as if this were the greatest tragedy since Agamemnon or New Coke.

He punched seven of the eight keys.

“All right,” said one of them.

“Well, well, well,” said Swagger, “they speak English.”

“Now, Mr. Swagger,” said the speaker, “I hate to squish your big moment here, having bested two Grumley and enjoying the damned hell out of it, down to victory laps, high fives, and fireworks, but do you really think we’d move against a tricky bastard like you and this federal man without no Plan B?”

“Oh, boy,” said Nick, “I’ll bet this Plan B is something. This one’ll be good.”

“I think you’ll cotton to it,” said the talky one. “In fact, here’s my prediction: I bet that, inside of a half an hour, not only have you let us go but you’ll have given us the Colt Monitor there so we can complete our business successfully. It ain’t yours, after all, it’s Baby Face’s; you’ve no particular right to it except the right of salvage. You can have the FBI shit for the museum, if you want it. Not only will you wave us bye-bye but you’ll both be thinkin’, Damn, I’m glad we run into Grumley. Damn, that was the luckiest thing ever.”

“He’s got a pair,” said Nick, “I’ll say that.”

“What have you got that I want?” said Swagger, leaning forward.

“We know what happened to your grandfather,” said the Grumley, smiling.